Court Opinion

ID: 9475390
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:25:47.220212+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:41.333469
License: Public Domain

BOWMAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Having reviewed the record of the trial in this case, I am satisfied the jury’s verdict is supported by sufficient evidence that Samuels was sane when he committed this offense. Sam-uels’s witnesses and the government’s chief witness, Dr. Pettipiece, offered conflicting views on the issue of Samuels’s mental state. The jury was entitled to credit Dr. Pettipiece’s opinion, and it did so. In today's decision the Court, without benefit of having seen or heard any of the witnesses, simply substitutes its appraisal of their testimony for the jury’s appraisal, and thus usurps the function of the jury. Particularly regrettable is the fact that the Court’s opinion brushes aside Dr. Petti-piece’s uncontradicted testimony that Sam-uels told him during their initial interview that he was not having one of his periodic “spells” at the time he wrote his threatening letter to the President. Here is what Dr. Pettipiece said in response to a question on direct examination:
At [the time of the initial interview] his paranoid schizophrenia was in remission. He was not having delusions. And in fact when he talked to us in his initial evaluation, he told me that at the time that this had happened — I asked him specifically if he was hearing voices or if he was paranoid or if he was sick at the time. And he told me that he was not having delusions at the time this happened, that he knows when these spells that he has are coming on. He gets headaches and he gets nervous and anxious and he can tell when they are coming on. And he was not having it during the time that this letter was written.
IV Trial Transcript, pp. 10-11. I believe it is clear that this unrebutted testimony in and of itself amply supports the jury’s verdict. Other testimony, which for the sake of brevity I shall not recount here, provides still further support for the verdict. Accordingly, I cannot agree that the government produced insufficient evidence from which the jury reasonably could find that Samuels was sane at the time he committed the offense of which he has been found guilty.
Finding no merit in Samuels’s other arguments, I would affirm his conviction.