United States v. Chisholm

• Decision Date: 06 May 1907
• Citation: 153 F. 808
• Parties: UNITED STATES v. CHISHOLM.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of Alabama

153 F. 808

UNITED STATES v. CHISHOLM.

United States Circuit Court, S.D. Alabama, Northern Division.

May 6, 1907

Thomas R. Rhoulhac, U.S. Dist. Atty., W. L. Steele, Asst. U.S. Dist Atty., and Lee Bradley, Special Counsel.

Frank S. White, for defendant.

HUNDLEY District Judge (charging the jury).

This defendant is indicted for the violation of a federal statute (section 5209, Rev. St. U.S. (U.S. Comp. St. 1901, p. 3497)). The offense charged in the indictment, stated in forms varying in the different counts thereof from 22 to 42 inclusive, is that of embezzlement of funds belonging to a banking association; in this case said association being the First National Bank of Birmingham. The first 21 counts of the indictment are not insisted by the government.

The defendant by his counsel has admitted the taking of the funds, but says he is not guilty as charged, because at the time of the taking of said funds he was suffering from insanity, in this: That the act was done while acting under an insane delusion that he could control the cotton market and that this insane delusion was of such a nature that it unbalanced his mind and rendered him irresponsible for the act committed. The effect and purpose of these admissions are to support all the charges in the indictment, as to the taking of the money, and require at your hands a verdict of guilty on those charges, unless the proof offered in this case of the mental condition of the defendant at the time he took the money raises in your minds a reasonable doubt of his legal responsibility for his said act. Since, in the absence of the defendant's admissions, he would be presumed to be innocent until the contrary was shown beyond a reasonable doubt, so now, although the law presumes him to be legally responsible, this presumption and his admission would, in the absence of proof as to his mental condition, authorize and require his conviction, still, this proof being made as to his mental condition, you are required to consider it, and if upon consideration of the whole proof you are fully satisfied that he did the acts charged (which are fully admitted), but are also satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that at the time he did the acts charged he was legally responsible, you should convict him on the counts in the indictment, but otherwise you should acquit him on said counts.

Every person charged with crime is presumed to be sane-- that is, of sound memory and discretion-- until the contrary is shown by proof. No act done in a state of insanity can be punished as an offense. The question of the insanity of the defendant has exclusive reference to the act of which he is charged and the time of the commission of the same. If he was sane at the time of the commission of the act, he is punishable by law. If he was insane at the time of the commission of the act, he is entitled to be acquitted. A safe and reasonable test is that whenever it shall appear from all the evidence that at the time of committing the act the defendant was sane, and this conclusion is proven to the satisfaction of the jury, taking in the consideration all the evidence in the case, beyond a reasonable doubt, he will be held amenable to the law. Here, whether the insanity be general or partial, whether continuous or periodical, the degree of it must have been sufficiently great to have controlled the will of the accused at the time of the commission of the act. Where reason ceases to have dominion over the mind, proven to be diseased, the person reaches a degree of insanity where criminal responsibility ceases, and accountability to the law for the purpose of punishment no longer exists.

The real test, as I understand it, of liability or nonliability, rests upon the proposition whether at the time the defendant took the money he had a diseased brain, and it was not partially diseased, or to some extent diseased, but diseased to the extent that he was incapable of forming a criminal intent, and that the disease had so taken charge of his brain and so impelled it that at the time his will power, judgment, reflection, and control of his mental faculties were impaired so that the act done was an irresistible and uncontrollable impulse with him at the time he committed the act. If his brain was in this condition, he cannot be punished; but, if his brain was not in this condition, he can be punished by the law, remembering that the burden is upon the government to establish that he was of sound mind, and by that term it is not meant that he was of perfectly sound mind, but that he had sufficient mind to know right from wrong, and, knowing that the act he was committing at the time he was performing it, was a wrongful act in violation of human law, and he could be punished therefor, and that he did not perform the act because he was controlled by irresistible and uncontrollable impulses. In that state of the case the defendant could not be excused upon the ground of insanity, and it would be your duty to convict him. But, if you find from the evidence, or have a reasonable doubt in regard thereto, that his brain at the time he committed the act was impaired by disease and the embezzlement was the product of such disease, and that he was incapable of forming a criminal intent, and that he had no control over his mental faculties and the will power to control his actions, but simply took the money from the First National Bank of Birmingham while he was laboring under a delusion which absolutely controlled him, and that his act was one of irresistible impulse, and not of judgment, in that event he would be entitled to your acquittal. However, in the consideration of this question, you must bear in mind, gentlemen, as I have said, that it is a presumption of the law, justified by the general experience of mankind, as well as of considerations of public safety, that a man is presumed to be sane until he is proved to be insane. If this presumption was not indulged, the government would always be under the necessity of adducing affirmative evidence of the sanity of the accused at the outset. And a requirement of that character would seriously delay and embarrass the enforcement of law against crime, and in most cases be unnecessary. Consequently the law assumes that every one charged with crime is sane, and thus supplies in the first instance the required proof of capacity to commit crime. It authorizes the jury to assume at the outset that the accused is criminally responsible for his acts, but that is not a conclusive presumption, which the law upon grounds of public policy forbids to be overthrown or impaired by opposing proof.

It is a disputable, or often designated a rebuttable, presumption, resulting from the connection ordinarily existing between certain facts-- such connection, as said by Greenleaf, in his work on Evidence, not being 'so intimate, nor so nearly universal, as to render it expedient that it should be absolutely and imperatively presumed to exist in every case, all the evidence to the contrary being rejected; but yet it is so general, and so nearly universal, that the law itself, without the aid of a jury, infers the one fact from the proved existence of the other, in the absence of all opposing evidence.'

The defense attempted to be made by the proof is that as a result of certain mental delusions the defendant's mind became so diseased as to render him incompetent or unable to discern the wrong in these acts done by him, or to resist the impulse to do them. It is not every suspicion, or degree of unsoundness of mind, that makes a man irresponsible. It need not be violent, or be manifestly alike on all subjects, but it must be such on the particular subject out of which the acts charged as an offense are claimed to have sprung as to render him incapable by reason of such mental unsoundness to discern the wrong in committing such acts, and it must be shown that the acts resulted from such unsoundness of mind. As was said in the Guiteau Case (D.C) 10 F. 168:

'A jury is not warranted in inferring that a man is insane from the mere facts of his committing a crime, or from the enormity of the crime, or from the mere apparent absence of adequate motive for it, for the law assumes that there is a bad motive, if nothing else appears.'

In order to enable you to exercise a safe judgment on the question of the defendant's responsibility at the time of the commission of the acts complained of in the indictment you have been permitted to hear proof of his habits and conduct for a period of time prior to, during, and since the time of the taking of the money, and as to his health and physical condition prior to the money, and as to acts. Ordinarily witnesses...