Court Opinion

ID: 9617971
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:04:15.878468+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:21.593330
License: Public Domain

Smith, Justice,
dissenting.
1. Certainly, compare Stevens v. State, 256 Ga. 440 (350 SE2d 21) (1986). Two men, possessed with uncommon religious fervor, kill people to whom they are closely related by friendship or marriage. Of the two, the record reveals Stevens to have been far more lucid than Eason in the time period surrounding their respective acts of violence.
The police picked up Stevens more than a full day after he had killed his wife, after he had associated peacefully with a number of people. Stevens at the time was fully clothed, and possessed the ability to communicate lucid, though strange, thoughts to others. The police took him to the station rather than to the hospital.
Police, answering at least the fourth call about Eason during the week of his violent behavior, found that Eason had spent the previous twenty-four hours burning televisions and clothing, walking nude around Bloomingdale while carrying a shotgun and a Bible, and firing the shotgun at friends and strangers. At the time that the police picked Eason up, he was “babbling” about Satan and religion. The police took Eason directly to the hospital where he was strapped to a *707guerney, still naked, and diagnosed by the admitting physician as acutely psychotic.
Both Eason and Stevens took actions or made statements that could be construed as signifying a capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. Stevens asked about the death penalty, attempted to wipe blood from the scene, and stated that he would be a murderer if his wife did not rise from the dead as planned. His statements and actions related directly to the crime for which he was charged. This court recognized, however, that this evidence could only be employed logically to refute a defense of lack of capacity and did not relate at all to the “delusional compulsion” defense found at OCGA § 16-3-3.
Eason told police that in scratching his fiancee’s face with a cross, he was attempting to pop bumps on her face. He also ran into his parents’ house after killing Kelley. Here, in spite of the fact that both of these items of evidence relate only to a defense of lack of capacity, and one involves an incident other than the crime for which Eason was charged, the court has reversed itself and now cites the evidence in support of the jury verdict. Perhaps there are standards of review at work, here, which override the law of relevance and render irrelevant any notions of consistency.
No evidence, save the presumption of sanity, tends to show that Eason killed Moody as a result of anything other than a delusional compulsion brought on by the mental illness found by the jury. Only one bit of evidence other than the irrelevant evidence cited above and the purely ambiguous “evidence” found in Items (d) and (f) of the evidence cited in support of the jury verdict could be rationally cited as evidence that Eason killed Kelley as a result of anything other than a delusional compulsion brought on by his mental illness. That bit of evidence consists of the testimony of a person who was within “hollerin’ ” distance, who claimed to have heard Eason tell Kelley that he hated Kelley before he fired the final shot into Kelley.
2. Stack up the presumption of sanity and the one piece of competent evidence that Eason killed Kelley as a result of anything other than a delusional compulsion, keeping in mind the absence of evidence that Eason killed Moody as a result of something other than a delusional compulsion. Stack up the evidence that Eason was religiously obsessed to the point of burning dolls, selling his truck to raise money to buy crosses which he could use to scratch his fiancee’s face, speaking often of the arrival of paradise on the weekend of the killings, and strolling naked in January, shotgun and Bible in hand. Add to the second stack the testimony of two psychiatrists, the doctor who admitted Eason to the hospital on the night of the second murder, and at least one policeman, that Eason’s delusions totally controlled him. Do not even go into the many, many other small items of evidence in the record pointing to the fact that Eason was full-blown *708crazy.
Compare the first stack of evidence with the second. Conclude that someone could rationally find the first stack a more accurate indicator of the forces driving Eason to act, or, in legal terminology, a preponderance of the evidence. You have performed a resurrection, the very feat which eluded Mr. Stevens. You have breathed life back into the “any evidence rule”; the rule this court allegedly killed in Brown v. State, 250 Ga. 66, 71 (295 SE2d 727) (1982).
3. The addition to the Official Georgia Code of the guilty but mentally ill statute, OCGA § 17-7-131, did not change our standard of review from that found in Brown, supra, and it did not affect or alter the definition of the “delusional compulsion” defense. The majority opinion, by implication, and Justice Gregory’s concurrence on its face, act as though OCGA § 17-7-131 gives a jury a third option as to degree of culpability on the part of a defendant. While such a distorted perception of the effect of the adoption of OCGA § 17-7-131 on the part of a jury may be troublesome, that perception on behalf of this court, the body created by the people to protect the rights of even the crazy individual, amounts to a slap at the constitution.
a) Mental illness has always been an element of the delusional compulsion defense. The defendant has always had to prove mental illness as a prerequisite to a successful showing of insanity under OCGA § 16-3-3. Justice Gregory’s concurrence misses the mark in implying that a finding of mental illness is anything new in a trial involving OCGA § 16-3-3. Once a jury finds mental illness, as the jury in this case did, the question then becomes whether the mental illness caused a delusion which overmastered the defendant’s will, compelling him to commit the crime for which he was charged. A reviewing court, thus, has to determine the same exact thing that it considered back in 1982, before the passage of the guilty but mentally ill statute.
b) The addition of “guilty but mentally ill” to the list of possible verdicts, as well, has absolutely no effect on the jury’s determination of the culpability of the defendant or on the amount of time to which a defendant is sentenced, a fact which might surprise many jurors. A verdict of guilty of murder but mentally ill still brings a defendant a sentence of life imprisonment. Such a verdict is tantamount to a finding of “guilty but with a serious heart problem.” The additional verbiage may explain why the defendant robbed a store to raise money for his bypass operation, and it may entitle the defendant to adequate medical care, but he will not complete his sentence one day earlier than he would under a simple sentence of guilty. His guilt, as a legal matter, is not mitigated one whit.
“Guilty but mentally ill” may now be a third choice of words that a jury may choose in a case such as this case. That verdict, however, still means guilty, and only carries with it the promise of psychiatric *709care, which becomes particularly important in a case such as this one in which a crazy man faces a future of life in prison. To use the new verdict as an excuse to change the standard of review in cases such as this, to change the definition of an unaltered statute, or to brand a man a murderer where the law and facts clearly indicate that the man was not sane amounts to an amendment of the statutes and the constitution of this state by this court in the name of expediency. Perhaps one reversal of a conviction of an insane killer is all this court can handle in one term. Compare Stevens v. State, supra.
Decided February 26, 1987.
Robert Blevins Royce, for appellant.
Spencer Lawton, Jr., District Attorney, Barry I. Mortge, Assistant District Attorney, Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General, Dennis R. Dunn, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.