Court Opinion

ID: 9466646
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:21:44.976021+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:50.724623
License: Public Domain

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge,
concurring in the result:
I think this case is within the exception to Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 97 S.Ct. 2497, 53 L.Ed.2d 594 (1977), but since I perceive no violation of any constitutional right, I agree that the writ of habeas corpus should have been denied.
There was good reason for defense counsel not to have objected to the psychiatrist’s testimony on the basis of a violation of defendant’s constitutionally protected privilege against self-incrimination. The trial was in 1976. Gibson v. Commonwealth, 216 Va. 412, 219 S.E.2d 845 (1975), showed that admission of the confession in a Virginia trial court was clearly unobjectionable. There was also prejudice. Conquest had *1057ught to show that confessions to police-en were involuntary, so that the psychia•ist’s statements of Conquest’s admission him, including disclosure of the greedy otive, was surely calculated to influence he jury toward conviction. Thus I find oth cause for the lawyer’s failure to object and prejudice to the defendant. However, I find no violation of any constitutionally protected right, notwithstanding our decision in Gibson v. Zahradnick, 581 F.2d 75 (4th Cir. 1978).
In Gibson, the defendant, thoroughly out of touch with reality, was committed involuntarily to a state mental hospital. With medication, after time, he began to improve. Though told by a state-employed psychiatrist that he was free to talk about the death of his wife and father-in-law or not, he was told that it would be better if he talked about it. He then told the psychiatrist that he remembered killing his father-in-law, though he stated that he could not remember what happened after that.
We held admission in evidence of that confession to the psychiatrist was in violation of Gibson’s right against self-incrimination. Gibson had been charged with the offenses. He was in custody. The examination was procured by the state, and not by Gibson. It was conducted by a state employed physician at a time when Gibson, at the very least, was in a poor condition to judge the consequences of his statements.
We have no such considerations here. Here, Conquest, through his lawyer, sought the examination. Since he was indigent, there was an application to the court for the appointment of a psychiatrist, but the only state action in arranging the examination was entirely at the behest of Conquest. Clearly it was the lawyer’s hope that the psychiatric examination might produce some basis for a defense of insanity in a prosecution in which the only other possible defense was an extremely weak and fragile claim of self-defense.1
When a killer confides to a friend, we do not turn to a recitation of the principle that the state may not compel a defendant to incriminate himself. We simply recognize the fact that he is free to confide in a friend if he wishes and must suffer the consequences if the friend later betrays the confidence. Conquest confided in this private-practitioner-psychiatrist examining him on the basis of his own lawyer’s request. If that confidence is now thought to have been unwise because Virginia does not recognize a physician-patient privilege in these circumstances, it does not disclose any violation of any federal constitutional right. See Thornton v. Corcoran, 407 F.2d 695, 700 (D.C.Cir.1969). It probably was not even unwise, since Conquest faced almost certain conviction if he was unable to develop a defense of incompetence at the time the crime was committed.

. The victim was attacked from the back and stabbed 21 times.