Court Opinion

ID: 9451410
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:17:00.65538+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:43.732149
License: Public Domain

WATERMAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the result):
Though it is a bit difficult to cast aside the belief that one who plans to perform certain acts and does them according to plan should be held responsible for his conduct, I realize that that belief is out of style these days, and that modernists hold that one’s will may be so meaninglessly exerted as not to have any causal relationship to conduct.
Therefore, I am happy to concur with my colleagues in promulgating for the time being the standard of responsibility for one's conduct that is set forth in the American Law Institute’s May 4, 1962 Official Draft of its Proposed Model Penal Code, to wit:
Section 4.01 Mental Disease or Defect Excluding Responsiblity
(1) A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to eonform his conduct to the requirements of law.
(2) The terms “mental disease or defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.
Modern beliefs, which have apparently been validated by responsible empirical studies, regarding the determinants of a person’s conduct, require of the judiciary that we modernize our judge-made rules that relate to the relationship between intent-activation and conduct. In so doing we but simply continue the process of judicial adaptation to new discoveries, new conditions, even new terminologies, which adaptation has been the peculiarly significant genius of our judge-made common law.
I say “for the time being,” for though we now have been persuaded that we should be dissatsfied with the M’Naghten Rules because of the discoveries which, whether for good or ill, have in the six score years since M’Naghten changed our concepts of “mental disease,” it is nevertheless also true that the scope of serious expert inquiry into the control of conduct has not halted, and tomorrow we may find that Section 4.01 needs further judicial emendation in the light of tomorrow’s further discoveries. In the present case, then, I join my brothers in remanding the case to the district court for a new trial, the trial to be so conducted as to permit the introduction of testimony germane to a factual resolution of behavioral responsibility contemplated by the above-quoted Section 4.01, and, in which, when *629the evidence shall have been closed, the finder of fact shall determine the defendant’s responsibility for his alleged criminal conduct by recourse to that Section’s standards.