Hart v. United States, No. 7940.

• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (District of Columbia)
• Writing for the Court: GRONER, Justice, and MILLER and VINSON, Associate Justices
• Citation: 130 F.2d 456,76 US App. DC 193
• Parties: HART v. UNITED STATES.
• Decision Date: 31 July 1942
• Docket Number: No. 7940.

76 US App. DC 193, 130 F.2d 456 (1942)

HART
v.
UNITED STATES.

No. 7940.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Decided July 31, 1942

130 F.2d 457

Mr. Henry Lincoln Johnson, Jr., of Washington, D. C., for appellant.

Mr. Charles B. Murray, Assistant United States Attorney, of Washington, D. C., with whom Mr. Edward M. Curran, United States Attorney, of Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellee.

Before GRONER, Chief Justice, and MILLER and VINSON, Associate Justices.

MILLER, Associate Justice.

Appellant was tried in the District Court for the killing of his wife and was convicted of second-degree murder. On this appeal he relies upon four alleged errors. He challenges, first, the admission of testimony concerning his mental condition at the time of the trial. This testimony was offered by the Government to rebut evidence of appellant's insanity at the time of the homicide. Appellant contends that the testimony "was immaterial and tended to confuse the jury." The general rule is that in order to ascertain a person's mental condition at a particular time it is proper to receive evidence of the condition of his mind during a reasonable period both before and after that time;¹ where it has any tendency to throw light on the condition of mind of the accused at the time of the commission of the act charged.² The law does not fix the time arbitrarily but leaves its determination in each case to the sound discretion of the trial court.³ In the present case, it appears that this discretion was wisely exercised, in view of the history of appellant's mental condition. This included lay evidence concerning peculiar conduct by appellant prior to the time of the homicide; expert evidence that ten months following appellant's indictment he suffered from prison psychosis and was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital;⁴ evidence that several months later he was released from the hospital as a sane person and that, at the time of the homicide, he suffered from an epileptic state or fugue. No contention was made, on behalf of appellant, that he was insane at the time of the trial. On cross-examination appellant's witnesses were asked how long, in their opinion, appellant had been in an epileptic state at the time of the homicide, whether it was curable, and whether it was likely to recur. It was in rebuttal of their testimony that the Government drew from its witnesses evidence concerning the nature of the mental disease which had caused appellant to be adjudicated insane, whether that mental disease was curable, whether it was likely to recur and what his mental condition was at the time of trial. Under these circumstances, it does not appear that there was abuse of discretion by the trial court.

Appellant's second contention concerns instructions, given and refused, upon the subject of insanity. Specifically, he objects that the court refused to grant a prayer reading as follows: "The jury is instructed as a matter of law that sufficient evidence has been adduced to raise the issue of the defendants sanity at the time of the crime, and that the government has the burden of proof to establish

130 F.2d 458

beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was of sound mind and not impelled by an uncontrollable or irresistable sic impulse at the time of the offense." The only error predicated on the refusal to grant this prayer is that the jury was not informed that the presumption of sanity has no evidential weight once the issue of insanity has been raised by the introduction of evidence by the defendant. But, assuming the correctness of this proposition, the proposed instruction is wholly lacking in language which would have been helpful to the jury in that respect. As it was, therefore, an inadequate and insufficient statement, which failed to reveal the proposition for which appellant now contends, there could be no error in its rejection;⁵ and this is even more true because the requested prayer as it was actually drafted was adequately and substantially covered by the charge given.⁶ The court instructed the jury that the issue of insanity had been raised by the appellant, and that the Government had the burden of proving his sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. Under the circumstances, it was not required to go further.⁷

Appellant's third contention is that the court erred in failing to give an instruction to the effect that the jury might consider the question of appellant's sanity as evidence in...