Court Opinion

ID: 9727290
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 13:29:36.553857+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:36.004909
License: Public Domain

Heher, J.
(dissenting). I hold the view that on the issue of insanity the verdict is contrary to the weight of the evidence. Insanity is an affirmative defense, to be proved by a preponderance of the evidence, and the proofs here would seem to satisfy that standard.
Dr. Colley and Dr. Spradley, physicians specializing in neurology and psychiatry, both in the state service, assigned to the accused by the court in compliance with a request of his counsel for informed professional aid and assistance in relation to the defense of insanity, and Dr. Collins, long a physician and specialist in the same field, who examined the accused as the representative of the State, but was called as a witness on his behalf, all testified that he was afflicted with dementia praecox, of the paranoid type, more lately classified as schizophrenia, a major adolescent psychosis, and was incapable of differentiating right from wrong and of comprehending the nature and quality of his acts at the time of the fatalities made the subject of the indictment.
Dr. Kinley, a physician and specialist in neuropsychiatry, called as a witness by the State, agreed that the accused was a schizophrenic, but he was of the opinion that on March 7, 1953, the time of the homicidal act, he knew “the nature and quality of his acts” and the “difference between right and wrong” although he conceded that the following June he ‘Tad a fixed opinion that the defendant was not able to confer with his counsel.” Dr. Eobie, the second specialist in psychiatry called by the State, classified the accused as a “psychopathic personality” or a “constitutional psychopathic inferior,” but capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.
And in 1937, while confined in the State Prison at Trenton under a sentence for crime, Dr. Paul B. Means found *96that he was a psychopathic personality and a constitutional defective.
All the standard works on mental diseases define schizophrenia as a form of insanity which has its inception in puberty or adolescence, usually with a hereditary background, and is attended by a mental or physical lack of potentiality for development; the individual is “stranded on the rock of puberty.” The paranoid form is the worst of a progressive dementia.
Against this specialized opinion the lay opinion of his jailkeepers can have little or no significance on the inquiry of criminal accountability.
I shall not go into the evidence. It suffices to say that the proofs indicate a conforming behavior pattern.
And, apropos of this, there was an undue exclusion of testimony from the accused’s mother concerning his early history and psychological background relevant to the inquiry of the existence of a schizophrenic or manic-depressive psychosis.
Criminal responsibility is of the very essence of punitive measures. Confinement is the means of society’s protection against a dangerous lunatic, as well as the care of the victim.
I would reverse the judgment.
For affirmance — Chief Justice Vanderbilt, and Justices Oliphant, Wacheneeld, Burling, Jacobs and Brennan — 6.
For reversal — Justice Heher — 1.