Court Opinion

ID: 9454722
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:56:12.474837+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:15.602845
License: Public Domain

FAHY, Senior Circuit Judge
(concurring specially):
I concur in the excellent analysis and discussion in the opinion of Judge Baze-lon until I reach the lines of the last paragraph which follow our affirmance of the conviction. There too I join in his note of sadness over the troubling ehar-acter of such a case. Yet I cannot join in attributing our decision to the fiction that Adams is an evil man who is held responsible by reason of a social hypocrisy that he is. The court acts for society in this case. If we consider that the evidence requires acquittal on the ground of insanity we have the power and the duty so to decide and we should not affirm; rather, we should direct acquittal, as we have done in other cases. E. g., Frigillana v. United States, 113 U.S.App. D.C. 328, 307 F.2d 665; Isaac v. United States, 109 U.S.App.D.C. 34, 284 F.2d 168. Society does not require us to do otherwise.
In characterizing the result we reach as due to a fiction that Adams is an evil man I assume the opinion does not intend to imply that evil itself is a fiction, or that it is fictional for the law to imply that robbery is an evil. Our present function in any event is only to decide whether the trial judge — a jury having been waived — could reasonably have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Adams’ conduct was not the result of a mental disease or defect, but was conduct for which he was responsible under standards we ourselves have established. In making this decision I do not judge Adams to be an evil man or attribute to society a derelicition I do not myself confess. Moreover, one may differentiate between what is evil and who is evil, at the same time accepting the good faith of society in involving the individual in remedial measures.*

 It is no departure from our affirmance to add that much could be said for sending appellant to St. Elizabeths for such treatment as is there available rather than to send him to prison:
The remedy of treatment results in the accused returning to life of the community only after disinterested experts think he may safely do so; whereas the person imprisoned enters again into the community when his sentence is served though he may not be ready for a law-abiding life. For these reasons, as well as because the criminal law does not punish in the absence of blame, we should guard against imprisonment where a reasonable doubt exists as to sanity in its relation to the crime charged.
Douglas v. United States, 99 U.S.App.D.C. 232, 240 n. 12, 239 F.2d 52, 60 n. 12.