Court Opinion

ID: 9846238
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:37:35.058126+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:36.025769
License: Public Domain

THOMPSON, Judge,
concurring.
¶ 18 I agree with the decision set forth above. I write separately only to indicate that we should signal a retreat from the Lyons dictum employing a version of the irresistible impulse test for mental capacity. The Lyons court wrote before John Hinck-ley, who shot President Reagan, was acquitted by a jury. The Hinckley case, and the public outrage that followed, occasioned a reevaluation of progressive movements favoring a liberalized volitional standard4 for measuring insanity. As a consequence, the medical community now acknowledges that it cannot discern whether an offender could not or would not control himself. See Richard J. Bonnie, The Moral Basis of the Insanity Defense, 69 A.B.A.J. 194, 196 (1983). Since we cannot know with any confidence whether a person committing a violent act suffers from an incapacity to “govern his conduct in accordance with reason” due to mental derangement, or whether he just chooses not to regulate his conduct, tests that are based on measures of volition are futile and invite deception and fabrication. The acts of one who knows the right but chooses the wrong cannot be indemnified, consistent with well-established public policy which we reaffirm here.
¶ 19 Since the tortfeasor in Lyons was M’Naghten insane,5 borrowing the volitional test from the New Jersey Supreme Court was gratuitous.6 Although we have continued to cite the Lyons dictum approvingly since 1981,1 would abandon it.

. One such liberalized standard, the Model Penal Code provision (commonly known as the "ALI test”) for an insanity defense, embodied a concept that one should be relieved of responsibility even for "propulsions that are accompanied by brooding or reflection.” Phillip E. Johnson, Note: The Turnabout in the Insanity Defense, in Criminal Law 349, 350 (West Publ'g Co.3d. ed., 1985). Thus, our holding here (which I join), that the jury finding that Kogianes committed premeditated murder means that he acted intentionally within the meaning of the intentional acts exclusion, might involve a non-sequitur if we must employ a volitional standard for the latter. In the murky world of volition, it might be possible to act on impulse after reflection.

. See Globe American Cas. Co. v. Lyons, 131 Ariz. 337, 343 n. 2, 641 P.2d 251, 257 n. 2 (App.1981).

. Indeed, prior to New Jersey’s Ruvolo decision, it was widely assumed, not without good reason, that the standard for insanity for purposes of the intentional acts exclusion was the same as the test for the insanity defense in criminal cases. See Nat’l Life & Accident Ins. Co. v. Hannon, 212 Ala. 184, 186, 101 So. 892, 894, (1924); Mark*50land v. Clover Leaf Cas. Co., 209 S.W. 602, 605 (Mo.App.1919); Travellers' Ins. Co. v. Houston, 3 Willson 508, 509 (1888) (insanity standard same in civil and criminal cases).