Court Opinion

ID: 9752742
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:32:21.606542+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:21.501008
License: Public Domain

LARSEN, Justice,
concurring.
I join in the result reached by the majority opinion. However, I would limit all psychiatric evidence to a determination of sanity or insanity as set forth in the M’Naghten Rule. If an individual was insane per the M’Naghten Rule, then, obviously, that individual could have formed no specific intent to commit the crime in question.
MEMORANDUM *
McDERMOTT, Justice.
The majority assures us that M’Naghten is alive in Pennsylvania. Who he is and when he comes to town is, from this decision and its predecessors, not really knowable. *120Whoever M’Naghten turns out to be, for the nonce at least, he is not Mr. Weinstein.
While the majority opinion dutifully affirms the M’Naghten Rule, it only obliquely defines it. The rule as stated most recently by Mr. Justice Roberts in Commonwealth v. Roberts, 496 Pa. 428, 437 A.2d 948 (1981) is the classic definition. Once stated, it is glaringly clear that Commonwealth v. Walzack, 468 Pa. 210, 360 A.2d 914 (1976), Commonwealth v. McCusker, 448 Pa. 382, 292 A.2d 286 (1972), and the present opinion are flirtations on the psychiatric rialto, where one can hire a psyche for any occasion.
The M’Naghten Rule, affirmed now and of unbroken precedent, is as Mr. Justice Roberts said:
[A]t the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.
Commonwealth v. Roberts, 496 Pa. at 434, 437 A.2d at 951; Commonwealth v. Woodhouse, 401 Pa. 242, 249-50, 164 A.2d 98, 103 (1960), quoting Queen v. M’Naghten, 10 Cl. & Fin. 200, 8 Eng.Rep. 718 (1843). Mr. Justice Hutchinson is obliged to studiously distinguish the present case, not from M'Naghten, but from Walzack and McCusker.
In Walzack, McCusker, and now in Weinstein II, this Court allowed “psychiatric evidence” on whether there was specific intent in the commission of an offense. Walzack, 468 Pa. at 212, 360 A.2d at 915 (1976); McCusker, 448 Pa. at 391, 292 A.2d at 291 (1972). What the “psychiatric evidence” may be is the question put here. That the case answers, perhaps for the fourth time, that “irresistible impulse” is not a relevant concept shows the price we must pay for the lure to erudite analysis of evanescent psychiatric theories. See Commonwealth v. Weinstein, 442 Pa. 70, 274 A.2d 182 (1971) (affirmance by an equally divided Court). In prior opinions larded with conflicting psychiatric texts, our grip on the sane, sensible' and now reaffirmed M’Naghten Rule trembles. In view of the decision here, once again allowing *121undefined “psychiatric evidence,” what is and what is not relevant will remain a question until every imaginable quirk of the human species is contested before this Court.
One need not go beyond the case at hand to prove the point. The dilution of M’Naghten by Walzack and McCusker has seeded this appeal. Appellant Weinstein did his killing in 1968. Here before, he now returns over a decade later, under the auspices of Walzack and McCusker, utilizing the ambiguity of “psychiatric evidence” that is now perpetuated. He will be back at the next slip of the pen.
This case, with its distinctions and justifications, affirms that “psychiatric evidence” is admissible when relevant. It does not say that that evidence must be relevant under the M’Naghten Rule. In short, it plunges us into determinations that are and will be experimental at best, leaving the trial courts without guidance and our dockets filled.
The M’Naghten Rule is clear. It sweeps away as irrelevant all proferred evidence which cannot say that by reason of a disease of the mind the defendant did not and could not know the difference between right and wrong at the time the crime was committed. Hence, “irresistible impulse,” “diminished responsibility” are irrelevant, as is any evidence that is not offered to satisfy the structure of the M’Naghten Rule, including the litany recited by Justice Horace Stern in Commonwealth v. Neill, 362 Pa. 507, 67 A.2d 276 (1949):
Certainly neither social maladjustment, nor lack of self-control, nor impulsiveness, nor psycho-neurosis, nor emotional instability, nor chronic malaria, nor all of such conditions combined, constitute insanity within the criminal-law conception of that term.
362 Pa. at 514, 515, 67 A.2d at 280. In short, we should make it clear that only unambiguous psychiatric evidence, offered to prove insanity under the M’Naghten Rule, is relevant and acceptable.
To allow evidence that cannot say with certainty that one is insane under the definition of M’Naghten is to allow anyone to say anything they wish, hardly a rule of relevance. Hence, we should say that evidence of alleged insan*122ity is irrelevant unless that evidence offers that by reason of a disease of the mind, a disease objectively and psychiatrically measurable, the defendant did not know and could not know the difference between right and wrong at the time the crime was committed.

 Although I took no part in the consideration of the merits of this case having been a member of the panel below which received appellant’s plea, I write to address a question of law which transcends the particular issue presented here.