Court Opinion

ID: 9453879
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:26:59.901685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:50.838592
License: Public Domain

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge:
The defendant appeals from a conviction of bank robbery, contending there should have been a directed verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The contention is insubstantial, and the conviction is affirmed.
Immediately prior to the robbery of the bank, Wilson spent four days in jail on a charge of public drunkenness.1 During those four days, he seemed to his jailers “queer.” A “model prisoner,” he was sometimes normally responsive conversationally, but at other times appeared not to understand what was being said to him. One of the jailers related the unresponsive interludes to periods of despondency, and each of *461them sympathetically confirmed the fact of a seizure, which was assumed to be epileptic and for which he was given an-ticonvulsive medication.
On leaving the jail, without having had any alcohol for four days, Wilson went tó a bank, passed a prepared note to a teller, received the money, threatened to kill the teller if an alarm was sounded before Wilson left the bank, turned midway toward the door and again at the door to repeat and emphasize the threat, and fled with the money. He took a taxi and asked the driver to take him to a department store where he might buy clothing. The driver attended him in that project and, after purchase of the clothing, drove Wilson to a whiskey store where, inferentially, Wilson purchased a bottle of whiskey. Wilson then asked to be taken to a hotel where he could get a hair cut and a place to sleep.
He was arrested while in the barbershop.
At the trial, it was sought to be shown from the seizure in the jail and from the defendant’s unconfirmed report of a subsequent seizure while under observation at St. Elizabeth’s that he was an epileptic and criminally irresponsible. The defense was exploded when the psychiatrist offered in its support testified that (1) he did not think the defendant’s seizure was epileptic, (2) that confusion after an epileptic seizure — a grand mal — lasts for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and (S) with the anti-convulsive medication Wilson had received in jail, an epileptic would be unexposed to seizures and completely normal mentally and emotionally.
On cross-examination and subsequent re-direct examination of the psychiatrist, it was brought out that Wilson’s controls are impaired. While the psychiatrist testified that he thought that Wilson, while under observation at St. Elizabeth’s, was a malingerer, exaggerating his epileptic symptoms, giving the wrong answers to all of the trick questions and being so uncooperative that they could not obtain a reliable I.Q. grade, the witness concluded that Wilson suffered from a sociopathic personality disorder.
With no reference to his history, except for the fact that his mother had died in a mental institution, there was very little violence in his history and that he was forty-six years old and divorced, the doctor expressed a number of conclusions.
■ Wilson is a chronic alcoholic. There is some evidence of organicity, brain changes resulting from prolonged alcoholic excesses, but that was minor and could not explain any departure in his conduct from normalcy.
The psychiatrist described Wilson as irresponsible, self-centered, egocentric and infantile. He never attained emotional maturity nor had he acquired in any significant degree those moral inhibitions which govern the conduct of normal adults. Without such inhibitions and with his preoccupation with his own needs and wants untempered by any concern for the rights of others, Wilson would do anything he wished if he thought it would serve his purposes. Wilson, the psychiatrist thought, fully understood the difference between right and wrong, but his abstract understanding was not a great restraint because of the absence of normal moral inhibitions. Though the psychiatrist noted that there was little or no violence in Wilson’s history,2 the witness thought Wilson would do anything if he wished to strongly enough and thought he could get by with it.
Wilson has no psychosis of any kind, but without normally developed moral inhibitions, he has no effective inner controls over his conduct. To that extent, he has an impaired capacity to conform his conduct to standards generally observed by normal adults. The witness *462harked back to an old term “moral insanity” to describe Wilson’s marked character defect exemplified by his primitive conscience. Wilson is so immature emotionally and morally, the witness said, as to be a .caricature of a responsible adult.
The doctor felt that Wilson’s prognosis was extremely poor. No treatment with any hope of improvement was indicated, but the witness was of the opinion that, at large, Wilson would inevitably be in trouble with the law.
We may pause here to note the basic factual sparsity of the record. After the peg of epilepsy, upon which the defense sought to hang its hat, was brushed aside, the expert witness was allowed and encouraged to state his conclusionary appraisal of the defendant. Conclusionary answers were given to questions which called for them and which, most frequently, were attempted to be cast in terms of ultimate inferences. “Does the defendant know the difference between right and wrong?” “Has he the capacity to refrain from doing what he wants to do if he wants very much to do it?” These are summary paraphrases of a barrage of questions that ultimately elicited in considerable detail the psychiatrist’s summary description of the defendant. No one, however, asked the witness about the bases of his judgment. The government may be under some restraint in probing those bases too deeply when they include a long record of prior convictions, but the defense is not. It may be strategic for the defense to avoid bringing out information about a criminal record which indicates a propensity to commit the kind of offense with which the defendant is charged, but looking at the presentence report, that was not the case here. The deficiencies of the record here seemingly result from an elementary preference for the unexamined con-elusions of the expert witness over their factual predicates. It was only by happenstance that the witness testified that there was very little violence in Wilson’s history, and the paucity of other basic information is proclaimed by the fact that we know nothing else about him except that he was forty-six years old, white and divorced. The doctor testified that Wilson had been a failure in everything he ever attempted, but the jury and we know nothing of anything Wilson ever attempted except marriage, and that is entirely unelucidated.3
Had this trial occurred after our decision in Chandler, we would have been inclined to remand the case for a retrial on the issue of mental responsibility because of the failure to develop the factual bases of the psychiatrist’s opinions. The trial was at an earlier date, however, and we do not think the District Judge can be faulted for not having injected himself into the case more extensively than he did. Nor can we find any absence of fundamental fairness in the trial. The psychiatrist’s description was full, complete and extensive, though the factual bases for his description and his judgments are lacking. His emphatic statement of his conclusionary views may have been far more effective from the defendant’s standpoint than they would have been if he had been called upon to justify them. At any rate, he undertook to describe the man and was in no sense limited to answers to the ultimate questions to be submitted to the jury.
Under these circumstances, we think it unnecessary, on our own initiative, to remand the case for a partial retrial.
On this appeal, it is contended only that the defendant was entitled to a directed verdict of acquittal by reason of insanity. The contention is without foundation. The jury was not bound to *463accept the conclusionary appraisal of the expert witness, but, even if it did, there is nothing in the law which requires a jury to acquit the kind of sociopath the doctor thought the defendant to be. As a standard for criminal responsibility, we have approved and adopted the American Law Institute’s formulation.4 Its references to powers of control, as emphasized by the caveat, do not encompass those who do not wish to control and restrain their conduct as contrasted with those whose controls are not governed by their wishes. As long as an individual has a substantial capacity for choice, he does not escape the law’s criminal sanctions because he chooses imprudently or so prefers his immediate self-interests that he is prepared to commit deliberate transgressions whenever he thinks they will advantage him and that he will not be caught.
This is not to say that Wilson’s claim of innocence by reason of insanity was not appropriate for consideration by the jury. There is enough doubt about -a sociopath such as he to call for an exercise of the jury’s moral judgment, but the jury is not required to accept the most favorable implications of the most favorable answers of lay and expert witnesses without regard to qualifying and explanatory testimony. Nor are unqualified and unexplained conclusions of a witness binding upon a jury when their factual bases are not probed or explained. The psychiatrist here never expressed the opinion that Wilson had no substantial capacity to control his conduct in the context of a bank robbery, but, if he had, the opinion would not bind the jury in the absence of a proven factual predicate which would admit of no other conclusion. The question was clearly one for the jury, and the motion for a judgment of acquittal, which would have deprived the jury of its function, was properly denied.
This disposes of the defendant’s contentions. He has raised no question about the court’s instructions, though we notice them in light of our recent adoption of the American Law Institute’s formulation.
In charging the jury on the question of mental responsibility, the court used a liberalized version of the charge approved by the Supreme Court in the Davis cases.5 The jury was told, in pertinent part, that even though Wilson knew the difference between right and wrong and knew that the act he was committing was wrong he should be acquitted if “his will, that is to say, the governing power of his mind, has been so impaired that his actions are not subject to it but are beyond his control.”
The instruction is reminiscent of Had-field’s Case, 27 State Trials 1281 (1800) which we discussed in Chandler. It differs from the American Law Institute formulation but slightly. There is no direct reference to substantiality of capacity to control his conduct, but it suggested to the jury that if the act was beyond Wilson’s impaired capacity, they should acquit. The American Law Institute rule does no more. Importantly, the instruction does not imply that the jury must find a general destruction of the defendant’s will, as Davis does; impairment is enough if the act is beyond the reach of the diminished capacity to control.
If the instruction as given is not the equivalent of the American Law Institute rule, the difference is so slight that a retrial is not required. This is particularly so in light of the fact that defense counsel affirmatively approved the charge as given and has not questioned it here.
Affirmed.

. From the pre-sentence report, read and discussed at the allocution, this was not a novel experience for him. The list of convictions for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and two or three convictions for such offenses as theft of government checks, filled eight pages.

. A fact confirmed by the record of convictions considered at the allocution. Stealth, stealing checks seems to have been in character, but not bank robbery.

. See Washington v. United States, D.C.Cir., 390 F.2d 444; United States v. Chandler, 4 Cir., 393 F.2d 920. We imply no criticism of defense counsel, however. It may not have seemed in the defendant’s interest to bring out all that we find deficient in the record. That is one of the problems of our present procedure.

. United States v. Chandler, 4 Cir., 393 F.2d 920

. Davis v. United States, 160 U.S. 469, 16 S.Ct. 353, 40 L.Ed. 499; Davis v. United States, 165 U.S. 373, 17 S.Ct. 360, 41 L.Ed. 750.