Court Opinion

ID: 9442931
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:04:19.57391+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:17.344834
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I dissent. In my opinion this is a truly shocking decision, the most shocking that has emanated from this Court and ranking among the most shocking judicial decisions. It is one step below the famous decree of the Supreme Court of Missouri, many years ago, when it reversed outright a first degree murder case on the ground that the grand jury had inadvertently left out the word “the” in the indictment.
It is not necessary to recount in all its horrid details this most revolting of crimes. Suffice it to say that the defendant raped a little nine-year-old child. He offered not a scintilla of evidence in his own defense except to say that he could not remember what had occurred.
Here at a time when the wave of sex crimes has reached such an alarming extent that Congress, the Bar, the prosecuting officials, the public and the press have been aroused as never before to the necessity of stamping it out, it remains for the highest court of this jurisdiction to flout the necessity for reform by reversing this case on a technicality so flimsy and unsound that it had to be evolved out of the inner consciousness of a member of the majority.
¿This appellant was apprehended by the police on the day following the commission of the crime. The testimony of the police officers was that he did not appear “normal”. New men do when they have a bad hangover.
When arraigned, appellant stated that he was without funds to employ counsel. The Court thereupon appointed Mr. George E. C. Hayes, one of the ablest and most respected members who practices at this Bar. Mr. Hayes, according to his own statement to this Court and the trial court, said that he had not been able to find any evidence as to the commission of the crime that negatived the certainty of appellant’s guilt except the far fetched theory advanced by appellant himself that he might have been doped by the mother of the child who had formerly been his mistress. There was not a shred of evidence to support this theory. Mr. Hayes therefore adopted the strategy of admitting guilt but of trying to avert the death penalty. In my opinion this was sound strategy even though it did not prove successful in this case. Mr. Hayes accordingly stated frankly to the jury that he believed the defendant guilty. The trial court adopted this statement from defendant’s counsel and incorporated it in his charge to the jury.
This is the gist of the majority’s complaint. I freely admit that the trial court is perhaps to be censured for telling the jury that Tatum was guilty, even after the admission by his own counsel, but I insist that it was not reversible error because of the circumstances of the case and the theory on which it was being tried by defendant’s counsel. If the repetition was error it was certainly harmless error.
The other point labored by the majority is that Judge Holtzoff erred, in failing to give, wholly on his own motion, an unasked for instruction that the Government had to prove Tatum’s sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. Under the doctrine of Holloway v. U. S., 1945, 80 U.S.App.D.C. 3, 148 F.2d 665, 666, “the burden is on the accused to overcome the presumption of sanity by evidence sufficient to create a reasonable doubt as to his mental capacity to commit the offense.” When the defendant has thus set up his defense, the prosecution must establish the sanity of the accused. It is only after this situation exists that the defendant becomes entitled to an instruction that the jury must believe that he is sane beyond a reasonable *620doubt. Insanity is an affirmative defense which must be alleged and proved like any other affirmative defense. In this case no insanity has been alleged except by the majority of this Court. It was not an issue at the trial. The issue is wholly created by the majority of this Court.
The climax of the majority opinion is in the following paragraph: “It should be noted that if appellant were ultimately acquitted on retrial 'because of insanity, he need not be set free but might be committed to a mental institution, thereby satisfying the interest of society both in the safety of the public and in-the rehabilitation of the offender.”
I wish that I might have the childlike faith and credulity to believe such a statement. But to any one old] enough to read a newspaper, the melancholy history of these cases is all too plain. The asylums for the insane are. overcrowded. They need the room. These sgx criminals are received into the institution and in a few months are discharged as cured — and proceed to go right out and commit the same crime again possibly in an aggravated form.
We are all familiar with the case of the old sex criminal who murdered and raped one little girl here, caught a train for Baltimore and within a week committed an identical crime there.
In my settled judgment this is a sad day for the enforcement of the criminal law and for the.safety of women and children in the District of Columbia.