State v. Box
| Decision Date | 05 November 1987 |
| Docket Number | No. 53417-9,53417-9 |
| Citation | 109 Wn.2d 320,745 P.2d 23 |
| Parties | STATE of Washington, Respondent, v. Jeremy BOX, Petitioner. |
| Court | Washington Supreme Court |
Seattle-King County Public Defender Ass'n, Janet Ainsworth, Seattle, for petitioner.
Norm Maleng, King Co. Pros., Robert S. Lasnik Monte E. Hester, Tacoma, amicus curiae for petitioner.
Chief of Staff, Seattle, for respondent.
At issue in this criminal case is whether the defendant was unconstitutionally assigned the burden of proving his insanity when he was tried and convicted of murder in the first degree.
Jeremy Box confessed that on the morning of May 27, 1984, he strangled Vesta Badeau and cut off her head with a butcher knife. In his recorded confession, the validity of which has not been questioned, he admitted that he had "premeditated it ... throughout just about the entire ... night."
On June 6, 1984, he was charged by a second amended information with murder in the first degree, while armed with a deadly weapon. He entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
A jury trial was held in Superior Court for King County. Defense counsel proposed jury instructions that would have given the State the burden of proving the defendant's sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial court declined to give these instructions and instead instructed the jury that the defendant had the burden of proving his insanity by a preponderance of the evidence.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty as charged. The trial court subsequently sentenced the defendant to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in an unpublished opinion. We granted discretionary review. 1
One issue is presented.
Was it unconstitutional to require the defendant to prove
his claim of insanity?
CONCLUSION. Insanity, by force of statute, is an affirmative defense in the State of Washington which must be raised by the defendant and proved by the defendant by a preponderance of the evidence. The legislative directives to this effect do not offend either state or federal due process guaranties.
By statute in this state, insanity is a defense that the defendant has the burden of establishing by a preponderance of the evidence. 2 In Washington, a defendant is required to satisfy the M'Naghten rule to prove that he is legally insane, i.e., the defendant must prove that at the time of the offense he or she was unable to perceive the nature and quality of the act charged or was unable to tell right from wrong with regard to that act. 3 More than half the states in the nation join Washington in requiring a defendant to prove a claim of insanity by a preponderance of the evidence. 4 The defendant argues, however, that this requirement violates both federal and state due process guaranties, and that the State should be required to bear the burden of proving a defendant's sanity when a claim of insanity is raised.
The burden which the defendant here seeks to transfer is the burden of persuasion. All courts require a defendant to bear the initial burden of producing some evidence of insanity, since the law presumes that defendants are sane at the time an alleged offense is committed. 5 The disagreement arises, however, over who must bear the burden of persuasion, or the burden of convincing the jury to accept their version of the facts. 6
First, we consider those jurisdictions that place the persuasion burden on the prosecution when insanity is at issue. Those jurisdictions argue that the two basic elements of a crime are a criminal act (actus reus) and a criminal intent (mens rea). 7 The issue of criminal responsibility focuses on the defendant's capacity to have the requisite criminal intent, or mens rea. 8 Society presumes the innocence of the accused and imposes on the prosecution the burden of proving the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Because guilt cannot be proven without proof of the defendant's mental capacity to commit the crime, such jurisdictions reason, the prosecution should bear the burden of proving the defendant's sanity. They consider that if the burden of proving insanity is placed on the accused, the accused will be forced to disprove an essential element of the crime (sanity), and they reason that this is no more appropriate than requiring a defendant to disprove commission of a criminal act. 9 In short, jurisdictions that place the burden of persuasion on the prosecution view sanity as an element required to formulate the mental state necessary for criminal behavior; hence, they require the State to prove it. 10
Next we examine the other jurisdictions which, like Washington, place the burden on the defendant. These jurisdictions do not perceive a necessary relationship between sanity and actus reus and mens rea. 11 Such jurisdictions differentiate the presence of mens rea from the capacity for responsible behavior, and perceive the issue of criminal irresponsibility as an affirmative defense to be proved by the defendant rather than as an element of the crime to be proved by the prosecution. 12 In these jurisdictions, the presumption of innocence that justifies placing the burden of persuasion on the prosecution is considered offset by the presumption of sanity. 13
In the federal system, recent legislation transferred the burden of persuasion from the prosecution to the defendant, who is now required to prove his or her insanity by clear and convincing evidence. 14 Cases interpreting the new federal legislation establish that placing the burden of proving insanity upon the defendant does not violate federal constitutional law. 15 In a series of cases, the United States Supreme Court has indicated that the allocation of the burden of proof as to insanity is not an issue of constitutional magnitude.
In 1952, the United States Supreme Court upheld an Oregon statute, since repealed, that required the accused to establish his insanity "beyond a reasonable doubt". 16 That case was Leland v. Oregon, 343 U.S. 790, 72 S.Ct. 1002, 96 L.Ed. 1302 (1952), wherein the Court held that due process does not guarantee any particular allocation of the persuasion burden. 17 This holding was questioned by some after the Court subsequently held in In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970), 18 that "the Due Process Clause protects the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which he is charged". In Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684, 705, 95 S.Ct. 1881, 1892, 44 L.Ed.2d 508 (1975) (Rehnquist, J., concurring), however, Justice Rehnquist wrote that he saw no conflict between Leland and Winship.
In Mullaney, the Court held that a Maine statute requiring a murder defendant to prove that he acted in the heat of passion violated the Winship due process requirement that the prosecution must prove every fact necessary to constitute the crime charged. 19 Justice Rehnquist wrote separately to show that the Court's opinion did not threaten the earlier holding in Leland. He stated that although evidence relevant to insanity may also be relevant to whether the required mens rea was present, the existence or nonexistence of legal insanity bears no necessary relationship to the existence or nonexistence of the required mental elements of the crime. As he wrote, "[f]or this reason, Oregon's placement of the burden of proof of insanity on Leland ... did not effect an unconstitutional shift in the State's traditional burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt of all necessary elements of the offense." 20 A majority of the Court evidently agreed with Justice Rehnquist, since in Rivera v. Delaware, 429 U.S. 877, 97 S.Ct. 226, 50 L.Ed.2d 160 (1976), the Court thereafter dismissed, as not presenting a substantial federal question, an appeal claiming that a state statute was unconstitutional because it required the defendant to prove insanity by a preponderance of the evidence.
The United States Supreme Court expressly declined to reconsider Leland and Rivera in Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 97 S.Ct. 2319, 53 L.Ed.2d 281 (1977). At issue in Patterson was the validity of a New York law requiring the defendant in a second degree murder prosecution to prove the affirmative defense of extreme emotional disturbance in order to reduce the crime to manslaughter. The Court upheld that law, holding that the defense did not negate any facts of the crime that the State had to prove to convict, but was a separate issue on which the defendant carried the burden of persuasion. 21 The Court stated that in convicting Patterson under its murder statute, New York did no more than Leland and Rivera permitted it to do without violating the due process clause.
[O]nce the facts constituting a crime are established beyond a reasonable doubt, based on all the evidence including the evidence of the defendant's mental state, the State may refuse to sustain the affirmative defense of insanity unless demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence.
Patterson, 432 U.S. at 206, 97 S.Ct. at 2325. The Patterson opinion added that proof of the nonexistence of all affirmative defenses has never been constitutionally required. 22 In Jones v. United States, 463 U.S. 354, 368 n. 17, 103 S.Ct. 3043, 3015 n. 17, 77 L.Ed.2d 694, (1983), the Court again cited Leland with approval.
It is thus apparent that under current federal law, the fact of insanity does not negate, and is not even directly related to, the element of mens rea or intent. Accordingly, sanity does not become an element of a crime and federal due process guaranties requiring the prosecution to prove all facts constituting a crime are not offended when a defendant is given the burden of proving his or her claim of insanity.
The defendant and amicus curiae argue, however, that a different result is required under Washington case law and state constitutional due...
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