United States v. Torniero, Crim. No. 82-1106.

• Decision Date: 22 September 1983
• Docket Number: Crim. No. 82-1106.
• Citation: 570 F. Supp. 721
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Connecticut
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America v. John J. TORNIERO.

570 F. Supp. 721

UNITED STATES of America v. John J. TORNIERO.

Crim. No. 82-1106.

United States District Court, D. Connecticut.

September 22, 1983.

Michael Hartmere, Jeremiah F. Donovan, Asst. U.S. Attys., Alan H. Nevas, U.S. Atty., New Haven, Conn., for plaintiff.

Hugh F. Keefe, New Haven, Conn., for defendant.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER^*

JOSÉ A. CABRANES, District Judge:

Presently pending before the court is the United States' Motion to Reconsider the Law of Insanity (filed May 16, 1983).¹ The issues raised by that motion have been fully briefed, and the court has heard both the arguments of counsel and extensive testimony from expert witnesses on those matters. In this memorandum the court sets forth its ruling on the pending motion.

In an initiative apparently without parallel in American law, the Government asks this court to "abolish" the insanity defense. In other words, the court is asked to rule that insanity may not be asserted as a defense to a criminal prosecution, that a defendant may not call expert witnesses to testify about his mental condition, and that a jury may not receive special instructions on the question of insanity. The relief sought by the Government is sweeping and unprecedented.

The bases for this extraordinary motion are manifold. In its extensive memorandum in support of its motion,² the Government argues bluntly and forcefully that no legitimate purpose of the criminal justice system is served by maintenance of the insanity defense and that the practical consequences of the defense include the unsupervised release of some dangerous individuals from any form of governmental control or restraint, the sapping of public confidence in the nation's courts, the presentation of expert testimony in a setting that robs psychiatrists and other specialists of their credibility and undermines the value of their professional judgments, and the proliferation of endless new varieties of mental illness, asserted as defenses in ever more unlikely cases.

After prolonged hearings and a lengthy review of the pertinent literature, legal and medical, provided by the parties, the court cannot avoid concluding that the Government's concerns are genuine ones, accurately reflecting crucial problems that bedevil the country's courts, lawyers, and mental health professionals. The potential for confusion inherent in the system is starkly illuminated in the very case now before this court. The defendant has been charged with a relatively uncomplicated property offense, the interstate transportation of stolen goods. He now seeks to rely upon an insanity defense based upon a claim that he suffers from "compulsive gambling disorder." It is questionable whether such a disorder, characterized more by repeated engagement in a particular activity than by any derangement of one's mental faculties, amounts to a mental disease as that concept has long been understood by the criminal law. But it is even more troubling that the defendant asserts this defense in a case in which his alleged gambling is only tangentially related to the offense with which he has been charged. Despite the tenuous connection between the claimed disorder and the charged offense, the defendant asks that this court allow him to present to the jury the testimony of expert witnesses. Were the defendant's request granted, the jury might find itself faced with a parade of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and others, some testifying for the defendant, some for the Government. The jury would find itself working its way through voluminous, probably contradictory, testimony couched in the technical jargons of the various mental health professions. Finally, it is not inappropriate for this court to consider that if the defendant's request were granted the court might well be confronted, in some future case, with a defense based upon, say, drug addiction asserted by a defendant charged with, say, trafficking in firearms, and with this case accurately cited as precedent.

Accordingly, the court concludes that it is appropriate to exclude any expert evidence concerning the defendant's alleged "compulsive gambling disorder." The court nonetheless holds, for reasons spelled out below, that the full scope of the relief sought by the Government — abolition of the insanity defense — cannot be granted, in part because much of the relief sought can be afforded the Government on more narrow grounds. Thus, the court will grant the Government the limitation upon the defendant's evidence and instructions to the jury that it seeks in this case. While today's ruling pertains specifically to today's case, the court is not unaware of other cases and of the social and legal climate within which the instant case arises. It shares the widespread and growing public concern that new mental disorders appear to be fabricated in unending succession, that psychiatrists often are required to submit themselves to public grilling by skilled advocates, and that defendants increasingly seek to "explain" their alleged criminal acts as somehow compelled by pathologies of vague description and scant relevance. For more than a century, the insanity defense has expanded its role in our criminal justice processes. Today the court declines the Government's invitation to "abolish" that defense. The court does, however, hold that the defense can and should be limited to instances where a jury could find that the defendant's mind was truly alienated from ordinary human experience at the time of the commission of the acts with which he is charged and where that mental condition had a direct bearing on the commission of those acts.

I.

By indictment filed September 23, 1982, the grand jury charged the defendant, John J. Torniero, with ten counts of transporting stolen goods in interstate commerce, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2314. On October 12, 1982, pursuant to Rule 12.2, Fed.R.Crim.P., the defendant filed a Notice to Rely upon the Defense of Insanity and a Notice of Intention to Introduce Expert Testimony Regarding Mental Disease or Defect Inconsistent with the Mental Element Required for the Offense Charged. While the Government did not respond to those notices immediately, it did make the defendant and the court aware that it might pursue some form of opposition. Accordingly, after progress of this case had been somewhat delayed by a hearing on the defendant's motion to suppress evidence,³ the court set forth limitations for briefing of any issues the Government might raise in response to the defendant's notices.⁴ See Certified Official Transcript of Excerpt from Jury Selection (filed May 19, 1983). Pursuant to those limitations, the Government filed on May 16, 1983 its Motion to Reconsider the Law of Insanity. The court thereafter extended the time for responsive briefing by the defendant and set a date for a hearing on the Government's motion.⁵ That hearing, which included the testimony of numerous witnesses,⁶ began on June 21, 1983 and ended on June 29, 1983.

In seeking to rely on the insanity defense and to introduce expert testimony, the defendant argues that, at the time of the acts described in the indictment, he suffered from so-called "compulsive gambling disorder," as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3d Ed., 1980) ("DSM III"), § 312.31 at 291-292, promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association ("APA"). An individual suffering from that disorder is characterized as one who is "chronically and progressively unable to resist impulses to gamble," id. at 292. The defendant contends that his compulsive gambling led to an accumulation of debts that, in turn, compelled his commission of the acts with which he is charged.⁷

The practical effect of the defendant's notice of the introduction of expert testimony is to permit testimony on the defendant's behalf by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health specialists, who would, under Article VII of the Federal Rules of Evidence, be permitted to offer professional opinions on the existence and effect of the condition from which the defendant claims to have suffered and to testify in response to hypothetical questions. Furthermore, by raising the issue of insanity, the defendant seeks to impose upon the Government the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was in fact sane at the time of the offenses with which he has been charged.

In response to the defendant's notices and in support of its motion, the Government has submitted a "Brandeis-Brief" in Support of Motion to Reconsider the Law of Insanity (filed May 16, 1983). As a preface to its argument, the Government contends that reconsideration of the law of insanity, on the scale sought by the Government, is indeed within the authority of the court, because the insanity defense in federal criminal law was created by adjudication in the lower federal courts rather than by statute or definitive ruling by the Supreme Court.

The Government then advances two general lines of argument. First, the Government contends that none of the five generally-recognized objectives of the criminal justice system — isolation, general deterrence, specific deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution — is furthered by maintenance of the insanity defense. Second, the Government claims that the introduction of psychiatric testimony at a criminal trial undermines the processes of justice by providing evidence that is unreliable and confusing.

To a considerable extent the Government's argument draws its intellectual inspiration from the work of Dr. Abraham L. Halpern, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York Medical College, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at United Hospital in Port Chester, N.Y., and the author of several articles on the insanity defense. Dr. Halpern, who testified at length during the hearing on the Government's motion, has suggested that the insanity defense is a "legal fiction": not...