Court Opinion

ID: 9419852
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:51:49.290855+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:20.909999
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rutledge,
dissenting.
A revolting crime, such as was committed here, requires unusual circumspection for its trial, so that dispassionate judgment may have sway over the inevitable tendency of the facts to introduce prejudice or passion into the judgment. This means that the accused must not be denied any substantial safeguard for control of those influences. A trial for a capital offense which falls short of that standard, although unwittingly, does not give him his due.
Congress introduced the requirements of premeditation and deliberation into the District of Columbia Code, Title 22, §§2401, 2404, in 1901. 31 Stat. 1321, with which compare Rev. Stat. § 5339. I do not think it intended by doing so to change the preexisting law only in cases of intoxication. Hence, I cannot assent to the view that the instructions given to the jury were adequate on this phase of the case. I think the defendant was entitled to the requested instruction which was refused or one of similar import.
I have no doubt that the trial court declined to give it believing that it was not required, perhaps also that it would be erroneous. For the fair-minded and able assistant district attorney who argued the case here conceded, with characteristic candor, that the courts of the District have consistently limited the effect of the controlling Code provision, by way of changing the preexisting law, to cases of intoxication. But, for the reasons in the opinion of Mr. Justice Murphy, I do not think Congress intended the change to be restricted so narrowly. Accordingly I join in that opinion.
*495Apart from this defect, the instructions given were correct as far as they went. They were however in wholly abstract form, which in some cases might be sufficient. But the issues of premeditation and deliberation were crucial here on the question of life or death. A more adequate charge, I agree with Mr. Justice Frankfurter, would have pointed up the evidence, at least in broad outline, in relation to those issues.
Because I think the charge was deficient in not including the requested instruction or one substantially similar, thus in my opinion failing to meet the standard set by Congress in the Code, and because the effect of this deficiency was magnified by the failure to point up the instructions given in some more definite relation to the evidence, I think the judgment should be reversed.