Court Opinion

ID: 9715610
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:10:12.791387+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:36.303208
License: Public Domain

Robert W. Hansen, J.
(dissenting). If a husband testified under oath that he shot and killed his wife because he dreamed she was an armed Martian who had invaded their bedroom, it would be for the jury, as trier of fact, to believe or disbelieve his statement as to why he did what he did.
But what if that husband were to make that statement, not under oath, to a psychiatrist? What if that psychiatrist believed the account of the nightmare about an invader from Mars to be truthful, and based an opinion as to the husband’s insanity, in whole or in part, upon the truthfulness of such statement? Must the jury accept the husband’s statement as being true because the psychiatrist so accepted it? If so, the psychiatrist, not the jury, becomes the trier of fact.
The defendant here told four psychiatrists that, on the evening that he shot and killed his wife, (1) he had been drinking heavily; (2) that he slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow; (3) that he dreamed that an armed Vietcong soldier invaded the bedroom where he and his wife slept; (4) that he remembered shooting the Vietcong soldier, heard a shot and awoke to see his wife dead in the bedroom; and (5) that he remembered nothing else about what happened until he found himself in Disneyland, California, where he had taken his two children. Three psychiatrists accepted all of these statements by defendant as believable. One psychiatrist did not so accept them.
Three psychiatrists — Drs. Fosdal, Otto and Altmeyer, the last two court-appointed — interviewed the defendant and testified that he was insane under the ALI test. It is clear they accepted as true defendant’s statements concerning his drinking, dreaming and not remembering. *140As to statements made by the defendant, Dr. Fosdal testified, “My impression of Mr. Kemp as a historian, he generally seemed quite reliable. The information he volunteered seemed to be quite sincere, quite frank, and most of what he said I thought he was quite reliable as a historian.” Asked if his opinion would be different if he had not believed what the defendant told him, Dr. Fosdal answered, “If all was incorrect and a lie, it would probably change my opinion.”
One psychiatrist — Dr. Charles Cahill — testified that he could not form an opinion as to defendant’s sanity or insanity on the basis of the records he examined and defendant’s statements when he interviewed him. (Dr. Cahill spent two and one-half hours interviewing defendant and nine hours reviewing hospital records.) It is abundantly clear that Dr. Cahill did not accept as reliable the statements made to him by defendant. As to such statements, Dr. Cahill found a “marked credibility gap.” As to the statement about a Vietcong nightmare, Dr. Cahill concluded, “Whether or not this patient had a nightmare, as he says, is in my estimation entirely unfathomable. The description of this nightmare to me has some of the earmarks of a rationalization, or perhaps, more bluntly, an alibi.” As to defendant’s claim of not remembering taking his two children to California, Dr. Cahill testified, “. . . his comments to the children that they should not speak of anything that had happened, are also suggestive, at least hypothetically, that he was not in a state of complete behavioral disorganization.” Dr. Cahill noted inconsistencies in what the defendant told him about drinking. Dr. Cahill testified that, when he asked defendant whether he knew how his wife died, defendant replied, “I know how she died— but I don’t wish to answer for legal reasons. My attorney advised me not to say.” Later in the interview, Dr. Cahill testified defendant added, “It’s not good to remember *141—past thoughts have to be put away because remembering won’t help — it’ll mess myself up with details. You need to know the whys and not all that happened.” Dr. Cahill also testified that defendant admitted making false statements to the doctor at the Veterans Hospital in order to get out of the hospital. Dr. Cahill concluded, “In summary, exactly what happened on that night is in my estimation pure speculation. . . . There are so many variables, both known and unknown, that an opinion is a speculative guess.”
Asked by the trial court whether he was saying “you don’t think anyone can come to an opinion with reasonable certainty” as to defendant’s sanity, Dr. Cahill answered, “That is correct.” The exchange makes clear that Dr. Cahill was not disputing the opinions of the three other psychiatrists. Rather he was disputing or contradicting the adequacy or reliability of the basis of their opinions, to wit, the statements made by defendant as to what had transpired on the night of the murder. Dr. Cahill was making clear that defendant’s statements as to his drinking, having a nightmare and remembering nothing after hearing a shot and seeing the body of his dead wife were subjective, marked by inconsistencies, and not to be accepted as the factual basis for an opinion as to defendant’s sanity. In an exactly analogous situation, an Illinois court termed similar testimony to be “. . . related to the absence of objective facts, history and symptoms sufficient to form the basis of an opinion,” and concluded “. . . questions were presented requiring resolution by the jury.” (People v. Ureste (1972), 7 Ill. App. 3d 545, 550, 288 N. E. 2d 45, citing People v. Burress (1971), 1 Ill. App. 3d 17, 272 N. E. 2d 390, holding that the trier of fact “may consider the statements of the defendant as well as the physical and other facts in evidence.”)
*142Given such conflict in expert testimony as to the credibility of defendant’s account of what transpired, it was for the jury as trier of the facts to determine the credibility of defendant’s statements. As this court said in an ALI test insanity case, “. . . The issue as to sanity remained for resolution by the trier of fact. The issue of credibility of witnesses and of whether the defendant had met his burden of proof in establishing the defense of insanity was for the jury to determine. . . .” (State v. Bergenthal (1970), 47 Wis. 2d 668, 685, 178 N. W. 2d 16.) In Bergenthal, no expert testimony was offered by the state on the sanity issue, and nonetheless this court held that “. . . a reasonable juror could find the defendant sane at the time of the commission of the crimes without reliance upon the testimony of the court-appointed experts,” (Id. at pages 685, 686) stating: “The question of whether the defendant had met his burden of proof was one of fact for the jury, not one of law for the court.” (Id. at page 686) In the case before us, given the testimony of Dr. Cahill as to the inconsistencies and lack of reliability of defendant’s statements concerning his shooting and killing his wife, the jury here had a far stronger basis than in Bergenthal for finding defendant sane at the time of the commission of the crime of murder, second degree. So the writer would affirm.
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Leo B. Hanley joins in this dissent.