Court Opinion

ID: 9607984
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:04:16.879143+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:02:42.358252
License: Public Domain

GERBER, Presiding Judge,
specially concurring.
I write specially because, although I agree with the result and analysis, I feel some words are necessary regarding the conflict between the differing legal and psychological approaches to this and other cases.
In this case, before hearing any expert testimony, the original trial judge proclaimed that Brown’s acts of molestation were irrational:
“It seems to me that molestation of a child is not an act committed with reason ... again, the molestation of the child was an "irrational course of conduct ... to me at least that’s clear. It was an impulse, and I think we have here—a series of impulses that took place.”
Taken literally, the judge’s comment precludes any and all criminal convictions for child molestation as well as all intentional act exclusions in insurance policies. In a recent analogous case, DePasquale v. Thrasher, 890 P.2d 628 (1995), a child custody dispute, the trial judge announced before receiving any testimony that he would place custody wherever the psychologist recommended. We there held that the trial court erred in delegating judicial authority to the psychologist and changing custody without hearing evidence.
Both these cases reveal at a minimum unwarranted judicial deference to anticipated testimony from psychologists. It is one thing to hear testimony and weigh it after-wards; it is quite another for a judge to announce, before hearing any evidence, that he will believe and do whatever a psychologist recommends. Such an attitude is an *526abdication of judicial responsibility under an assumption of psychological infallibility. Judges are neither rubber stamps nor acolytes for psychological experts or, indeed, for any other expert.
Part of this unwarranted judicial deference to psychologists stems in the instant case from misperceiving the foundational difference between legal and medical approaches to human behavior. These analyses differ in their presuppositions and methods. While both seek to understand and shape behavior, the legal system approaches behavior in terms of moral judgment, whereas medical science generally approaches behavior in a scientific, judgment-neutral, empirical context. The legal model’s postulate of free will envisions people as morally and legally answerable for their conduct rather than as pigeons in a Skinner box. By contrast, the scientific model in most schools of psychology is largely deterministic: behavior results from causal antecedents like “impulses”, so that legal responsibility becomes irrelevant at best, an abstraction at worst. From Freud to Skinner this approach implies that behavior generally is explainable in terms of cause (“stimulus”) and effect (“response”), á proposition contrary to the legal postulate that people are accountable for conduct because they can ordinarily control it.
The psychologization of responsibility makes responsibility scientifically irrelevant because it cannot be reduced to observable causes. In this view, human behavior results from predictable, discoverable antecedents in one’s genes, upbringing, or outside environment. Responsibility disappears in the throng of what this trial judge called “impulses” supposedly controlling conduct; beset by “impulses,” we become a “nation of victims,” as a current bestseller puts it.
This methodological conflict obviously cannot be resolved here in one case, but it is a topic which deserves serious attention by those concerned about the latent tensions between the legal and psychological postulates about human behavior. Some softening of the positions of each may help to accommodate'the other. One place to begin, as Dr. Esplín fleetingly suggests in his testimony here, is that since most impulses are manageable, the general proposition that impulses eviscerate responsibility is simply false in the legal arena.
In the meantime, a judge abdicates judicial responsibility by capitulating to behavioral determinism or to the testimony or philosophy of any expert before it is even heard.