Court Opinion

ID: 9464534
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:36:44.765416+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:41.912669
License: Public Domain

IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Chief Judge
(concurring):
I concur in Judge Oakes’s meticulous and well-reasoned opinion. I would merely add that his painstaking exposition of the unfortunate details of Suggs’s “coming of age” points to an emerging and highly significant problem in the law, namely, the troubled relationship between the vagaries of psychiatric evaluation and the difficulties of judicial determinations of incompetence. At the time of Suggs’s plea, before one could be deemed incompetent to stand trial in New York, a judicial finding was required that he was in “such [a] state of idiocy, imbecility or insanity as to be incapable of understanding the charges against him or the proceedings, or of making his defense . . . New York Code of Crim.Proc. § 662 — b(1) (McKinney Supp. 1970).
Of course, psychiatrists are invariably enlisted to aid in- such determinations. Yet, psychiatry is at best an inexact science, if, indeed, it is a science, lacking the coherent set of proven underlying values necessary for ultimate decisions on knowledge or competence. It is suited, as it should be, to the diagnoses of illness or maladjustment for the purposes of treatment. Judges, on the other hand, while provided with a set of determinate values through the development of legal principles, simply lack the expertise to apply meaningful standards in individual cases. And, unfortunately, because of the imprecision of the norms in this area, much is lost in the translation from psychiatrist to judge or jury, between diagnosis and decision. This problem is even more striking where an individual is found not guilty by reason of insanity. There, the absence of a coherent psychiatric notion of volition and of workable legal standards results, it has been repeatedly claimed, in the administration of ad hoc justice.
Throughout his tortuous ten year history in the courts and in the psychiatric clinics, John Suggs was — and still is — a victim of our inability to deal adequately with this dilemma. It is clear from the record that his behavior is bizarre and destructive, and that he has never had much more than a tenuous grasp on reality. Perhaps Dr. Mes-singer’s assessment of his condition as “emotionally unstable, with depressive and paranoid trends” is correct; perhaps Dr. Lubin’s diagnosis of his condition of “schizophrenia” is more accurate. Fortunately, we need not reassess the medical testimony. Judge Duffy, who considered Suggs’s complete psychiatric history for the first time, was clearly correct in his decision to redetermine the issue of Suggs’s competence at plea, and his findings have ample support in the record. Yet, one cannot help but have the gnawing uncertainty, in deciding after ten years that civil commitment proceed*1120ings might be appropriate, whether both judges and psychiatrists have led Suggs on a long day’s journey into night.