United States v. Chandler, 9829

• Decision Date: 04 April 1968
• Docket Number: 9954.,No. 9829,9829
• Citation: 393 F.2d 920
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Rosalind Edith CHANDLER, Appellant. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Frederick Freeman LEISTER, Jr., Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

393 F.2d 920 (1968)

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Rosalind Edith CHANDLER, Appellant.

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Frederick Freeman LEISTER, Jr., Appellant.

Nos. 9829, 9954.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued June 20, 1966.

Decided April 4, 1968.

No. 9829:

Stanley E. Sacks, Norfolk, Va. (Sacks, Sacks & Kendall, Norfolk, Va., on brief), for appellant.

C. V. Spratley, Jr., U. S. Atty., and James A. Oast, Jr., Asst. U. S. Atty., for appellee.

No. 9954:

D. Reece Williams, III, Columbia, S. C. (Court-appointed counsel), for appellant.

Thomas P. Curran, Asst. U. S. Atty. (Thomas J. Kenney, U. S. Atty., on brief), for appellee.

Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, and SOBELOFF, BOREMAN, BRYAN and J. SPENCER BELL,^* Circuit Judges, sitting en banc.

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge:

En banc hearings were separately held in two cases in order to consider fully the appropriateness of the standards of mental responsibility employed in determining the guilt of defendants charged with crime. In the one case, the Court applied the M'Naghten — irresistible impulse test. In the other, alternative findings were made within the American Law Institute's recommended formulation and in terms of the M'Naghten and irresistible impulse tests. We affirm the conviction in each instance, for reasons later appearing, but we reject the M'Naghten test.

Chandler

Rosalind Chandler, tried by the Court without a jury on a charge of murder, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to imprisonment for nine years with immediate parole eligibility. On appeal, she contends that her act was the product of a mental disease, and that she should not be legally accountable for it.

Mrs. Chandler, the wife of a chief petty officer in the Navy, slew her husband while aboard his ship. After an evening of drinking, the two, with two other chiefs, had gone aboard the ship to get some things from Chandler's locker. There was testimony that Mrs. Chandler discovered in her husband's locker a letter, later introduced at the trial, addressed to him by another woman, in which the writer inquired about Chandler's continuing purpose to obtain a divorce. Mrs. Chandler began to abuse her husband verbally and to slap his face.¹ Chandler then kicked his wife in the area of the crotch sending her reeling backward against a buffet. She snatched open a drawer of the buffet, and seized a butcher knife with which she attacked her husband. After one or two misses, as Chandler stumbled backward over some furniture, she drove the knife into his chest, inflicting a wound of which he died almost immediately.

Mrs. Chandler quickly became repentant and was soon hysterical.

At a very early age, Mrs. Chandler was convicted of auto theft. After she became adult and moved to Norfolk, there was a steady succession of misdemeanor convictions, for drunkenness, immoral conduct² and disorderly conduct. She and her husband were given to excessive drink, and the psychiatric history indicates much reciprocal abuse, physical, verbal and psychological, of each other. Approximately two months before the homicide, she reported, Chandler struck her with a crutch, and she sustained a fracture of the jaw.

As a result of a pretrial psychiatric investigation at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, there was a diagnosis of "passive aggressive personality with alcoholic features." Such a person, a psychiatrist testified, was inclined to exaggerate human characteristics, to be immature emotionally and to give expression to anger in procrastination, pouting, stubbornness or violence. In Mrs. Chandler's case, the condition is moderate, and her intelligence is in the lower range of normalcy.

She has no delusions, no hallucinations, no paranoia. Her speech is relevant and coherent. In the opinion of the psychiatrist, she can readily distinguish between right and wrong and can conform her conduct to what she knows to be right, but, at the moment of the fatal attack upon her husband, she was not considering such things.

The psychiatrist thought her condition properly classified as a mental disease and her act a probable product of it and of passion and anger.

Psychiatric hospitalization was thought not essential.

The District Court found Mrs. Chandler mentally competent and guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which, it noted, was the voluntary killing of another without malice in the sudden heat of passion.

Leister

Tried to the Court, without a jury, Leister was convicted of bank robbery, and a sentence of fifteen years was imposed upon him with a recommendation that he receive psychiatric treatment and assistance and with parole eligibility in the discretion of the Parole Board.³

Leister approached a District of Columbia policeman with a proposal that they collaborate in the robbery of a bank. His choice of an accomplice was not misguided, for the policeman completely abandoned his public trust.⁴ Together, the two planned the robbery of a suburban bank in Maryland, and, approximately two weeks after the initial discussion, they robbed the bank they had selected. While the policeman held the manager at gunpoint, Leister, armed with another pistol supplied by the policeman, vaulted over the counter and emptied the tellers' cash drawers. He left his fingerprints on the counter, however, for he neglected to use the rubber gloves they had procured.

Leister is an attractive, intelligent man. He had an unhappy childhood. The son of a harsh and unsympathetic father and of an indifferent and sexually promiscuous mother, he was in the principal care of a grandmother. She, he felt, had little affection for him because he reminded her of his father, whom she detested. As a result, psychiatrists testified, he grew up with a sense of rejection and of animosity toward society.

In the Army, he went absent without leave with little reason. Paroled from a sentence for a felony, he violated the terms of his parole, with little reason in the opinion of the psychiatrists, by going to Canada. He married a registered nurse, but he moved her, and later their two children, from place to place. Apparently, he found ready employment as a linotype operator; she, as a nurse.

The diagnosis of one psychiatrist was that he had a "psychoneurotic reaction," a term he equated with neurosis. Leister is neurotic, he said, but not psychotic, an appraisal with which the other psychiatrists agreed. The other psychiatric witnesses used the diagnostic appellation, "emotionally unstable personality," but the difference in the labels is unimportant, for they evince no difference in the underlying psychiatric appraisal.

Leister is fully aware of the nature of his acts and the wrongfulness of criminal conduct. Generally, he is capable of conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law, but when he becomes emotional, he tends to act irresponsibly. His attitude is antisocial, and it will manifest itself sometimes in antisocial conduct, but, at any time, he has the capacity to control his conduct if he wishes to.

On that evidence the District Court found Leister mentally competent and guilty of the bank robbery. It found that Leister was suffering from a mental disease which impaired his personal relationships and affected his capacity to control impulsive reactions to real or fancied slights. The Court noted, however, that there was nothing impulsive about the bank robbery, as the two-week duration of the planning period demonstrated. It made specific findings in the phraseology of the recommended American Law Institute test that Leister, when robbing the bank, did not lack substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. Alternatively, it found that Leister knew the difference between right and wrong and that the robbery was not the result of an irresistible impulse.

Upon conviction, the District Court committed Leister under the provisions of 18 U.S.C.A. § 4208(b) for study. The very full report submitted upon completion of that study formed the basis for a motion for a new trial on the ground of after-discovered evidence, for the report contains suggestions that projective psychological testing contained indications of schizophrenic reaction of a chronic undifferentiated type. The psychiatric diagnosis, however, was sociopathic personality disturbance, antisocial type, and that was the primary diagnosis rendered by the psychological testing. The psychologist's report that testing shows "symptom formations suggestive of a schizophrenic personality disorder" does not alter the basic description of the man as disclosed by the psychiatrists at the trial. The very full Springfield report parallels the earlier testimony. It fully describes Leister's sense of rejection, the resentment of his parents, his brittle emotions, his resentment against society for his treatment by his parents and state authorities and for its failure to supply him with the help he felt he needed. The staff at Springfield reached the conclusion that Leister is not psychotic, but his personality structure is fragile, and any meaningful help would require intensive personalized psychiatric treatment over a period of a number of years. Such treatment is unavailable at Springfield, and the staff recommended confinement at a medium security prison for adults. Without the unavailable help, no substantial improvement can be expected.

Upon Leister's return to the Court and its consideration of the Springfield report, Leister was afforded a further right of allocution, and a sentence of fifteen years imprisonment was imposed upon him, subject to parole at such time as the Board of Parole may determine. The motion for a new trial founded upon the reference to schizophrenia in the Springfield report was overruled.⁵

Standards of Mental Responsibility

We plow no new ground. In recent years so much has been carefully and painstakingly written on the history...