Court Opinion

ID: 9445978
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:42:57.728186+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:28.690000
License: Public Domain

BURGER, Circuit Judge
(concurring with the opinion of the court).
I feel impelled to add a few observations concerning Judge Miller’s analysis of Carter v. United States.
First, it seems quite clear that Judge Prettyman in Carter v. United States, 102 U.S.App.D.C.-, 252 F.2d 608, was not undertaking to frame a charge to a jury or to say what they should be told. His objective was to supply a long and widely felt need for an explanation of the basis of the so-called “product test” so that trial judges would be better able to frame their own charges. Second, I think he intended to emphasize that mere presence of a mental disease or defect does not exculpate an accused, but that the disease must have a positive causal relationship, i. e., as we indicated in Carter v. United States, supra, and Douglas v. United States, 1956, 99 U.S.App.D.C. 232, 239 F.2d 52, that the disease or defect is the controlling, decisive, compelling cause of the act.
In Durham v. United States this court was not innovating a novel or untried doctrine of criminal law as perhaps some may have thought. Quite the contrary; the so-called “product test” had been in operation for nearly a century in New Hampshire before it was adopted here. Indeed, as Judge Pretty-man pointed out in Carter, this jurisdiction adopted the substance of the New Hampshire Rule in 1929 in Smith v. United States, 1929, 59 App.D.C. 144, 36 F.2d 548.
The dissent is critical of the “product test” as “an abstract, indefinite generality” and of the Carter opinion for its effort to supply the very deficiencies of which the dissent complains. It may well be that the effort to clarify will not reach its goal with all readers but there is no reason why it should not add to the understanding of those who will study it with open mind, particularly those who must deal with it in the first instance in the trial courts, which under our system are the primary dispensers of justice. These are complicated, difficult and trying problems for the law enforcement officers, for the profession and for the courts, and solutions are often elusive. As with all difficult legal problems the pronouncements of Carter v. United States require concentrated, thoughtful study, and where that is given improved understanding and better administration of justice will follow.