Court Opinion

ID: 9448972
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 23:51:16.329178+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:37.926168
License: Public Domain

McLAUGHLIN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
Once the true, undisputed factual situation here is squarely faced, the issue is simple.
There was no defense evidence that the defendant had not committed the homicide. Nothing to cause the jury to doubt this. No pretension that the defendant was somewhere else when the crime was perpetrated or that some other person of “rather similar appearance” to him was responsible. As the majority opinion states: “At appellant’s trial the only defense attempted was a showing and argument in mitigation that accused was a heavy drinker, that he was quarrelsome and bellicose when drinking, and that he had consumed considerable amounts of wine and whiskey shortly before setting out on his felonious enterprise.”
That defense was not directed at acquittal of the charge of first degree murder. Under the Pennsylvania law drunkenness is no defense to a felony killing. So what was sought was not an unlawful reduction of the crime of felony murder to some lesser offense (which could not have been accomplished under the charge) but for the jury to exercise its prerogative, under the evidence and in accordance with the charge, to make the sentence life imprisonment instead of death.
The trial court did charge if this was a felony homicide “then the affirmative defense of intoxication would not be meaningful at all, because the specific intent to kill is not required under our statute to raise the crime to first degree murder under such circumstances.” That went directly to the conviction of first degree murder. As to the penalty, the judge properly told the jury:
“If the defendant fails to prove the defense of intoxication to the satisfaction of the jury, this defense is not valueless. It does not deprive him of the benefit of whatever evidence is in the case on that subject when considered in connection with any other evidence in the case which might guide you as to the proper penalty in the event that you find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree. Again I remind you, members of the jury, that my recollectiori of the evidence is that there is very little, if any, evidence of intoxication. However, you are the fact finding body and it is your recollection, and your recollection alone, which governs and controls.”
That “affirmative defense of intoxication” was therefore before the jury on the one controverted issue of the trial, the question of whether the jury would *316sentence the defendant to die or to imprisonment for life. There was nothing collateral about that problem. And nothing collateral about the defense effort to satisfy the jury that Rucker was a heavy drinker through the years and was drunk at the time of the crime. The only fair inference from the testimony of his unfortunate sister was that Rucker, since his return from three or four years of combat service under General Patton, was a nervous, quarrelsome alcoholic who even fought with her and his brothers when he was drunk and because he was drunk. Quite a point is made by the majority with reference to Rucker’s “voluntary drunkenness”. It is not needed now but at any new trial it should be thoroughly established that an alcoholic’s drunkenness is not, generally speaking, voluntary but compulsive. Entirely aside from that, the trial jury had before it the miserable and pitiful deterioration of Rucker since the last war and the contention that he was intoxicated at the time of the slaying. Argued strongly to the jury, as this life or death proposition should have been and undoubtedly was, no one can reasonably say that the jury’s verdict of guilty of first degree murder would not have fixed the penalty at life imprisonment. And no one, once the significance of the above simple facts is understood, can reasonably say that putting before the jury when it was making its most serious choice, the prisoner’s past criminal record, did not substantially prejudice Rucker on the single real question before it. Until then, Rucker, justifiably, had an excellent chance of life imprisonment. That chance was destroyed by the jury being told that he had previously been indicted for murder, under which he had pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and that he had also been tried and found guilty of trying to kill somebody else.
It is heartening to note that the majority opinion does not pretend that the introduction of Rucker’s past crimes did not weigh heavily against him when the jury considered what his sentence should be. As Chief Justice Jones said in his dissent in Commonwealth v. DePofi, 362 Pa. 229, 251, 66 A.2d 649, 659 (1949), “The thing could, and no doubt has, actually worked out in practice in a truly shocking way.”
Basically this appeal is not concerned with the conviction for first degree murder. The drunkenness did not vitiate the degree of the particular crime. It did heavily affect the punishment for that crime. Ignoring that, as the majority does, will not resolve the injustice of the way the death penalty was assured. The difference between living and dying even for a Rucker, cannot be properly designated as “immaterial”. Rucker was grievously harmed by that evidence.
The exercise, attempted in the majority opinion, of compartmentalizing Scoleri does not come off successfully, because we are dealing with the penalty branch of the verdict, not the conviction itself as in Scoleri. The majority’s interpretation of the principle of the Scoleri decision is that serious prejudice to a defendant resulting from the presentation to the jury of his criminal record must result in reversal. That construction is open to serious doubt. Indeed, it is not easy to accept the complacent assumption that the admission of his prior crimes record could be nonpre judicial to a defendant under any circumstances. However, that impressive argument also need not be followed through at this stage of these proceedings since the prejudice to Rucker as to the sentence imposed was overwhelming. Let no one be confused by the endeavor to appraise the amount of prejudice to him with respect to the killing of the victim. There was no defense to that. The glaring wrong before us in this appeal affected the penalty; if upheld it sends Rucker to the electric chair. Scoleri had a defense on the merits which was damaged by his record being given the jury. We do not touch the problem of how badly the revelation of Rucker’s previous convictions hurt him with the jury as to the offense itself. That is not our current controversy. We are concerned exclusively with the penalty inflicted. *317The majority opinion does not even tangentially come to grips with that one part of the jury verdict which is flagrantly wrong and which calls for a reversal of the judgment of conviction.