State v. Wilson

• Decision Date: 26 August 1997
• Docket Number: No. 15310,15310
• Parties: STATE of Connecticut v. Andrew D. WILSON.
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court

Page 633

700 A.2d 633

242 Conn. 605

STATE of Connecticut v. Andrew D. WILSON.

No. 15310.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

Argued Feb. 20, 1997.

Decided Aug. 26, 1997.

Wesley W. Horton, with whom were Susan M. Cormier, Hartford, Joseph G. Bruckmann, Public Defender, and, on the brief, Monte P. Radler, Assistant Public Defender, for appellant (defendant).

Mitchell S. Brody, Assistant State's Attorney, with whom, on the brief, were Eugene J. Callahan, State's Attorney, and David I. Cohen, Senior Assistant State's Attorney, for appellee (State).

Before BORDEN, BERDON, NORCOTT, KATZ, PALMER, McDONALD and PETERS, JJ. ¹

PALMER, Associate Justice.

This appeal requires us to define the term "wrongfulness" for purposes of the affirmative defense of insanity under General Statutes § 53a-13 (a). ² A jury convicted the defendant, Andrew Wilson, of murder in violation of General Statutes § 53a-54a. ³ On appeal, ⁴ the defendant claims that the trial court improperly instructed the jury regarding the insanity defense. We agree and, consequently, we reverse the judgment of conviction. ⁵ The following facts are undisputed. The defendant and the victim, Jack Peters, were acquainted through the victim's son, Dirk Peters, with whom the defendant had attended high school. In early 1993, the defendant began to exhibit symptoms of a mental disorder manifested by a delusional belief that Dirk, assisted by the victim, systematically was destroying the defendant's life. ⁶ Specifically, the defendant believed that, in 1981, Dirk had poisoned him with methamphetamine and had hypnotized him in order to obtain control of his thoughts. The defendant believed that Dirk had been acting with the approval of the victim, who, the defendant also believed, was the mastermind of a large organization bent on controlling the minds of others. The defendant further believed that Dirk and the victim were responsible for the defendant's loss of employment, sexual inadequacy, physical weakness and other incapacities, as well as the deaths of the defendant's mother and several family dogs. In addition, the defendant blamed the victim and Dirk for the breakup of the defendant's relationship with a former girlfriend.

Beginning in approximately February, 1993, the defendant began contacting law enforcement authorities to inform them of the conspiracy by the victim and Dirk to destroy his life and the lives of others. He informed the police that Dirk was continuing to drug and brainwash people, and that Dirk should be stopped. He blamed the victim and Dirk for his own drug involvement and claimed that they were ruining other people's lives as well. ⁷ In May and June, 1993, the defendant repeatedly called the police, requesting their assistance in combatting the mind control conspiracy by the victim and Dirk. The police informed him that it was impossible to investigate his allegations.

On August 5, 1993, the defendant went to see the victim at his home in the city of Greenwich. He quarreled with the victim and then shot him numerous times with a semiautomatic revolver that he had purchased two days earlier from a gun dealer in the city of New Haven.

Later that day, the defendant entered the Greenwich police headquarters and stated that he had shot the victim because he "had to do it." The defendant thereafter gave a sworn statement to the police in which he indicated, among other things, that: (1) his life had been ruined by Dirk, who had drugged, hypnotized and brainwashed him; (2) the victim had assisted Dirk in these activities; (3) Dirk and the victim were responsible for the defendant's schizophrenia; (4) the conduct of Dirk and the victim required "drastic action" and "drastic retribution"; and (5) the defendant had shot the victim repeatedly at the victim's home earlier that day.

At trial, the defendant raised his mental illness as an affirmative defense under § 53a-13. The jury, however, rejected the defendant's claim of insanity and convicted him of murder. The trial court rendered judgment sentencing the defendant to sixty years imprisonment. This appeal followed. ⁸

The primary issue raised by this appeal is whether the trial court improperly failed to give an instruction defining the term "wrongfulness" under § 53a-13 (a). Section 53a-13 (a) provides that "[i]n any prosecution for an offense, it shall be an affirmative defense that the defendant, at the time he committed the proscribed act or acts, lacked substantial capacity, as a result of mental disease or defect, either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to control his conduct within the requirements of the law." (Emphasis added.) In this case, the defendant requested that the trial court instruct the jury that wrongfulness is comprised of a moral element, so that "an accused is not criminally responsible for his offending act if, because of mental disease or defect, he believes that he is morally justified in his conduct--even though he may appreciate that his act is criminal." ⁹ The trial court, however, refused to instruct the jury that the defendant was entitled to prevail under § 53a-13 (a) if the evidence established that the defendant believed his conduct to be morally justified. ¹⁰ The defendant argues that the court's failure to charge the jury on this moral component of the insanity defense requires reversal. The state, on the other hand, contends that the defendant was not entitled to such an instruction but that, even if he were, the trial court's failure to give this instruction did not constitute harmful error.

Our resolution of the defendant's claim requires us to answer three subordinate questions: (1) How should a trial court define the term "wrongfulness" as it is used in § 53a-13 (a) when a definitional instruction of that term is requested? ¹¹ (2) Was such an instruction necessary in this case in view of the evidence presented at trial and the defendant's request to charge? and (3) Did the trial court's failure to give a jury instruction properly defining "wrongfulness" constitute harmful error? We conclude that the defendant was entitled to receive an instruction properly defining the term "wrongfulness" and, further, that the trial court's failure to give such an instruction was harmful. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the trial court.

I

In determining the appropriate definition of the term "wrongfulness" under § 53a-13 (a), we are guided by familiar principles of statutory construction. "Our fundamental objective is to ascertain and give effect to the apparent intent of the legislature.... In seeking to discern that intent, we look to the words of the statute itself, to the legislative history and circumstances surrounding its enactment, to the legislative policy it was designed to implement, and to its relationship to existing legislation and common law principles governing the same general subject matter." (Citations omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) State v. Metz, 230 Conn. 400, 409, 645 A.2d 965 (1994). The language of the statute itself does not illuminate our inquiry. In ascertaining the meaning of the language of § 53a-13 as it applies to this case, therefore, we look, in the first instance, to the relevant legislative history for guidance. That legislative history includes the genealogy of the insanity defense in this state, the history of the Model Penal Code provision upon which § 53a-13 is based and the legislative debate surrounding the enactment of § 53a-13.

Prior to the enactment of § 53a-13, legal insanity was determined on the basis of a two part test established under our common law. ¹² In 1967, as a result of growing dissatisfaction with the standards from which this common law test derived, the General Assembly adopted the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code test for insanity, now codified at § 53a-13, ¹³ as a statutory standard to be invoked in lieu of the common law test. State v. Toste, 178 Conn. 626, 631, 424 A.2d 293 (1979). The Model Penal Code test provides, in language nearly identical to that now contained in § 53a-13 (a), that "[a] person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law." (Brackets in original.) I A.L.I., Model Penal Code and Commentaries (1985) § 4.01(1), p. 163 (hereinafter Model Penal Code).

For purposes of this appeal, three features of the Model Penal Code test are noteworthy. First, like our prior common law standard, this test encompasses, albeit in a different form, both a cognitive and a volitional prong. Under the cognitive prong, a person is considered legally insane if, as a result of mental disease or defect, "he lacks substantial capacity ... to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct." Id. Under the volitional prong, a person also would be considered legally insane if "he lacks substantial capacity ... to conform his conduct to the requirements of law." Id. Because the defendant does not claim that the trial court misinstructed the jury on the volitional prong of the insanity test, we need not consider the application of the volitional prong in our analysis.

Second, the Model Penal Code test focuses on the defendant's actual appreciation of, rather than merely his knowledge of, the wrongfulness of his conduct. Cf. General Statutes § 53a-13 (a) (defendant must lack "substantial capacity, as a result of mental disease or defect ... to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct"). The drafters of the Model Penal Code purposefully adopted the term "appreciate" in order to account for the defendant whose "detached or abstract awareness" of the wrongfulness of his conduct "does not penetrate to the affective level." I Model Penal Code, supra, § 4.01, comment 2, p. 166. As Herbert Wechsler, chief reporter for the Model Penal Code...