Court Opinion

ID: 9672616
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:57:59.276925+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:17.469726
License: Public Domain

PALMORE, Judge
(concurring).
I do not give to the bar and bench so little credit as to believe that today’s majority opinion will be the occasion of “con*867sternation.” This wee step forward in the wake of the giant strides made by the medical profession over the past 63 years in approaching an understanding of the human mind will be greeted by the enlightened as some assurance that the common law is not an ostrich. Certainly the medical witness, on whose testimony life and death may hang in the balance, will recognize that the improvement in terminology is far more than “technical.”
The dissenting opinion’s discussion of the recent Newsome case would leave the impression that the court had resolved and settled the question. The fact is that five members of the court were then dissatisfied with the old instruction and would not have affirmed in that case had it involved a death sentence. The Terry case was under submission at the time, and it was clearly understood that the old instruction would not survive it.
That the appellant was not insane, but merely drunk, is accepted by the dissenting opinion as a foregone conclusion. The majority of us are not gifted with such clairvoyance. We are not sure. If indeed it is true, we have no fear that another jury will not be able to say so. It must not be forgotten that the law exists for those whose rights are on trial, not for the courts. The inconvenience that may result from a retrial of this case — even the dubious “consternation” that may be felt in some quarters — could hardly outweigh the interest of the man whose life is on trial. To hustle him off to the electric chair when we are not altogether sure would be nothing short of reprehensible.
What the dissenting opinion terms “judicial fiat” is the substance of the common law. Who created the old instruction in the first place? The court. Whose responsibility is it, then, that the instruction be kept applicable to the facts of life as they are known to exist? The same court’s. If this process had not been recognized throughout the development of the common law over the past 800 years we would still be trying cases by battle-axe. Only the axe-maker can have sensed any “consternation” at being put out of business.
The reference to a remark by one of our departed members to the effect that the law is what the courts say it is does the injustice of appearing not to understand it. It was not, of course, an original or a humorous comment. Holmes, for example, voiced the thought that law can be nothing more than a prophecy of what the courts will do in a given case. This is not to be taken as meaning, and was not intended by Judge Cam-mack to imply, that the rule of law is by court whim. It means merely that in a real and practical sense the decision of the courts is the final test and best evidence of what the law is in any given case. No student of jurisprudence in the world of Anglo-American law would dispute that proposition.