Court Opinion

ID: 9724329
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:52:59.40536+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:59.323524
License: Public Domain

SIMONETT, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent from the court’s formulation of what constitutes an intentional act.
If a sane person takes careful aim at and shoots another person, there is liability for an intentional tort, but, because the act is intended, there is no insurance coverage. Yet if an insane person aims at and shoots his victim, we say there is insurance coverage. But if there is insurance coverage, this means the intentional act exclusion is inapplicable, which means there is no specific intent to injure. But then, where is the tort liability? If there is no intent to injure there is no intentional tort, but neither, unless words are entirely cast loose from their moorings, can it be said that taking careful aim and shooting someone is an act of negligence.
The fact of the matter, it seems to me, is that an insane person does form a specific intent to injure his victim. Consequently, if there is to be insurance coverage, we must be able to say that the insured’s act of shooting his victim is both intended and unintended. But how can the law have it both ways?
We must, I think, distinguish the standard of personal responsibility as it applies in the criminal law, as it applies in civil tort law, and as it is contemplated for liability insurance coverage. Criminal law, with its emphasis on punishment and moral condemnation, stresses the mens rea (the guilty mind). 1 Tort law, with its emphasis on compensating the victim, prefers to hold the insane person to the same standard of personal responsibility as a sane person. The problem for the court, then, in construing the liability insurance policy in an insanity situation, is how to protect the insured from tort liability with its objective standard of personal responsibility, while at the same time respecting the language of the intentional act exclusion which adopts a subjective standard of personal responsibility.
I would use a liberalized version of the M’Naghten test in construing the intentional act exclusion. The majority opinion, however, seems to me to go further. It holds that an act is also unintended “where, because of mental illness or defect, the insured is deprived of the ability to control his conduct regardless of any understanding of the nature of the act or its wrongfulness.” But to tell the jury it' may find a lack of intention where there is an inability to control one’s conduct seems to me a return to an uncontrollable urge or irresistible impulse test. While I do not deny there is a volitional component to human actions, I would not introduce an overt volitional-type test into liability insur-*334anee coverage. I would not do so for three reasons.
First of all, a mentally ill person, who knows he is doing wrong but does it anyway because he cannot help it, cannot be said to be committing an “unintentional act,” at least not if words are to be given their ordinary meaning. Put another way, the compulsion to injure, from whatever source it may arise, is not incompatible with the existence of an intent to injure. Hence the failure to resist temptation is ordinarily not considered as an excuse to avoid legal blame.
Secondly, there is no practical way of distinguishing between an uncontrollable and a controllable impulse. Because an impulse has not been resisted does not always mean that it could not have been. The problem is that there is simply no way to draft a jury instruction that can effectively guide a jury. The irresistible impulse test leaves too much to conjecture and unverifiable theorizing, not to mention self-serving excuses, which perhaps is why the test has not gained favor in our criminal law. Furthermore, I do not think a person’s cognitive and noncognitive impairments can be so neatly separated as the irresistible impulse test seems to assume they may be.
Third, I see no need for a volitional-type test. It seems to me that the M’Nagkten test can be construed broadly enough to satisfy the purposes of liability insurance coverage without doing violence to the ordinary meaning of the language of the intentional act exclusion.
M’Naghten excuses criminal culpability if the insane person is incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong even when the person knows the nature of his actions. A mentally ill person, for example, may know he is killing or attempting to kill someone but because of his delusion he thinks he is acting in self-defense or he is unable to understand the nature and consequences of the moral choices presented. See State v. Rawland, 294 Minn. 17, 45-46, 199 N.W.2d 774, 790 (1972). In Rawland the defendant, in the grip of a paranoid schizophrenic delusion, fatally stabbed his unsuspecting father in the back. There was expert testimony that defendant acted in self-defense, believing his fantasied enemies, embodied in the person of his father, were plotting to destroy him and he was without any avenue of retreat. Id. at 25, 199 N.W.2d at 779. In such situations, the person is incapable of regarding his act as wrong; or to put it another way, the mentally ill person is unable to “think rationally of the reasons which to ordinary people make that act right or wrong.” C.L. Ten, Crime, Guilt, and Punishment■ 125 (1987) (quoting an Australian jurist, Chief Justice Dixon).
I would instruct a jury somewhat along the following lines in an insurance coverage case: You are to determine whether or not the defendant’s intent to injure was intended within the meaning of the liability insurance policy. A person does not intend his wrongful actions if, because of mental illness or defect, he did not know the nature of what he was doing, or if he did know, he did not know it was wrong. A mentally ill person would not know that what he was doing was wrong if he was laboring under a mental disorder or delusion which rendered him incapable of ordering his thinking to evaluate rationally the matter then before him.
Under this approach, too, there would be a genuine issue of material fact to be resolved in this case, and consequently I agree the case must be remanded for trial. I join in the balance of the court’s opinion.