United States v. Parks, 71-1427.

• Decision Date: 02 May 1972
• Docket Number: No. 71-1427.,71-1427.
• Citation: 460 F.2d 736
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Harry Wayne PARKS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

460 F.2d 736 (1972)

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Harry Wayne PARKS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 71-1427.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

May 2, 1972.

Richard Davis, Tampa, Fla. (Court-appointed), for defendant-appellant.

John L. Briggs, U. S. Atty., Richard H. McInnis, Asst. U. S. Atty., Tampa, Fla., for plaintiff-appellee.

Before JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge, and INGRAHAM and RONEY, Circuit Judges.

JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge:

On March 1, 1969, Harry Wayne Parks forged a United States Government V.A. check and received $136 lawfully payable to Herman E. Walker. His picture, his handwriting and his presence at the indicated address all confirmed that he had done the deed. The only defense was a lack of criminal responsibility due to mental illness—a defense which the jury was disinclined to accept. On review of the record, however, we conclude that the implicit finding of sanity is so contrary to the manifest weight of the evidence that the District Court erred in refusing to grant a new trial. F.R.Crim.P. 33.

The Government's case was well presented. It adequately demonstrated that Parks was living at 2611 Tyson Avenue in Tampa, Florida. Payee Walker had previously lived at that address. A V.A. check payable to Walker had been sent to the Tyson address by mistake. Parks had taken the check to a local grocery store, stood before a Dubl-Check camera, endorsed the check with the name Herman E. Walker, given his address and received the $136.

The defense was insanity and the strategy was well developed by court-appointed counsel. The defense would first show, and then the prosecution would have to negate beyond a reasonable doubt,¹ that at the time Parks committed the offense in question he was i by reason of mental disease or illness either ii unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions or iii unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. See, Blake v. United States, 5 Cir. (en banc), 1969, 407 F.2d 908.²

To open its case, the defense presented the deposition of Dr. Glen, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry from Dallas, who had treated the defendant when he had been committed to a mental institution after an adjudication of incompetency in 1961—eight years before the asserted crime. Dr. Glen testified that Parks was then suffering from "chronic paranoid schizophrenia," a psychosis in which the person has "lost their ability to measure reality. * * * To put it in layman's language, he was crazy." Parks' schizophrenia was the "worst type to have, a continuous type that there is no real successful treatment of this kind of illness." It would be "very surprising" if Parks could have been recovered from this illness in 1969. More importantly, though Parks was released from the mental institution in 1962, Dr. Glen warned³ that periods of marked stress would trigger a recurrence of the psychotic syndrome and that Parks would again be unable to conform his conduct to reality. (TR 135-37).

Thereafter, defense counsel, posited to the doctor—as a hypothetical—the facts and circumstances later proved by lay witnesses producing a period of tremendous stress for the defendant and asked whether that stress would be sufficient to precipitate a psychotic episode. The psychiatrist answered that it would.

At this point the defense had established that Parks was suffering from mental disease which, if triggered by periods of marked stress, would manifest itself in the patient's inability to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. Next, five lay witnesses testified about the tremendous stress—the existence of which was of critical significance to Dr. Glen's conclusions—to which defendant had been subjected just prior to the forgery episode. Parks' 16-year-old stepson had suffered a brain hemorrhage and the doctors had informed the Parks that a second hemorrhage was inevitable and would be fatal. The child sustained brain damage as a result of the hemorrhage and suddenly forgot how to read and write. As a result, the wife suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. Upon her release, she became an alcoholic and, by her own confession, began conducting herself in something less than faithful fashion. Parks was forced to look after the children, and serve as both a mother and father to them. Meanwhile, one child ran away from home and another in the military was ordered to Viet Nam.

As Dr. Glen had warned to expect, physical manifestations of the schizophrenic syndrome he had described began to appear and were noticed by neighbors. The witnesses testified that Parks was usually a happy-go-lucky life-of-the-party type of person. (TR 180). He became withdrawn and introverted. He would no longer respond even to a friendly "Hello." (TR 199). He would spend hours at a time sitting in a tree house he had built for the children "just talking to himself." (TR 165). He became a religious fanatic, condemning everything anybody did. (TR 213). He did strange things completely out of character. (TR 206-07). He began to show signs of "pathological jealousy" and once exploded, striking his wife and breaking her jaw. (TR 210). In the words of a neighbor, "He just flipped completely." (TR 208). The neighbor continued, "He got withdrawn, and then he got bad tempered and quick and irritable, and then he started going off in a world of his own all the time." (TR 205-06). "He just wasn't the same person." (TR 204).

The symptoms of schizophrenia described by the doctor, which could be expected to be triggered by periods of great stress, had, as Dr. Glen had predicted, apparently begun to manifest themselves.

But the defense did not stop there. A second psychiatrist, Dr. Hardin, was called, this one court-appointed. Dr. Hardin had examined the defendant after the "crime" and his conclusion was unequivocal—"In my opinion, in and about February of 1969 when he committed this offense, I must, by a process of inference, be of the opinion that he was * * * not able by reason of mental disorder and disease to conform his conduct to the law."⁴

That Parks had established a strong case suggesting legal insanity could not seriously be disputed, and it was certainly enough to put a heavy burden on the Government to establish sanity beyond a reasonable doubt.⁵

The Government obviously realized this for at this point it presented its rebuttal testimony. The Government had not been satisfied with Dr. Hardin's conclusions so it had requested that Parks be ordered to present himself for psychiatric examination by a doctor of its choosing. It is the testimony of this third psychiatrist, Dr. Coffer, which, the Government argues, created the jury question on sanity. For, the Government urges, if this testimony were believed and the testimony of the defense psychiatrists and lay witnesses were not credited, its theory that Parks was, as Judge Ingraham so aptly characterized the theory from the bench during oral argument, "temporarily sane"⁶ at the time he committed the offense, would be established. On close reading, however, we are convinced that Dr. Coffer's testimony only reinforced the defense claim that Parks was, by reason of mental illness or disease, unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. At all events, as will be shown, this particular testimony standing alone could not support a finding of sanity beyond a reasonable doubt, particularly since the witness never expressed an opinion as to element iii of Blake, either in express words or in terms which fairly convey that standard.

The portions of Dr. Coffer's testimony relied on by the Government relate to element i of Blake—the mental illness or disease issue. Indeed, Dr. Coffer did express the conclusory opinion that "there was no evidence of any actual mental illness from the present examination, and no indication of any residuals of mental illness in the past, and from the history which I obtained surrounding the events in question,⁷ I did not feel within bounds of reasonable medical certainty that he was actually mentally ill in March, 1969." (TR 222, emphasis added).

If this assertion can be credited beyond a reasonable doubt, then Parks would fail in his attack. For mental illness is the indispensible element i of Blake. Without it, neither ii nor iii come into play and the conclusory opinions of Drs. Glen and Hardin on element iii would be legally insignificant.

The problem is that Dr. Coffer's medical conclusion was clearly predicated upon a very important⁸ factual assumption which was manifestly incorrect—"I felt that there was nothing to suggest from the findings that I had obtained, or the history, that he had experienced any brain psychotic episode or mental illness in the past." (TR 223). The error of that underlying fundamental factual assumption is indisputably clear. In 1961 Parks was adjudicated incompetent "by reason of underlying schizophrenic reaction" (described in the incompetency order as "chronic") by the County Court for Alachua County, Florida, and committed to the Macclenny State Hospital.⁹ Moreover, the uncontradicted testimony was that Parks had attempted suicide on at least two occasions,¹⁰ and the incompetency order recited "suicidal thoughts" as one of his propensities. The fact that Dr. Coffer's one hour interview with Parks 19 months after the offense had not developed these and other vital facts, cannot refute the live and documentary evidence that Parks was indisputably mentally ill at some point in the past.

In addition to the above, several other facts which were conceded by Dr. Coffer to be very significant to an opinion on mental illness apparently were undiscovered or unrevealed during the interview. For example, Dr. Coffer was evidently unaware of Parks' religious fanaticism, although he testified that "if a person becomes a religious fanatic, in a sense losing some reality orientation as to their own importance, then it would be...