A standard for state appellate court review of cases in which juries have rejected insanity defenses was announced Thursday by the Tennessee Supreme Court in a decision involving a Memphis man who shot a church counselor.
The court unanimously held that appellate courts reviewing cases in which juries have rejected the insanity defense should overturn a jury’s decision only if “no reasonable trier of fact could have failed to find that the defendant’s insanity at the time of committing the offense was established by clear and convincing evidence.” The court, however, was divided as to the application of the standard to the facts of the Memphis case.
Chief Justice Frank Drowota wrote for the majority that jurors “implicitly rejected” the insanity defense of Christopher M. Flake when they convicted him of attempted voluntary manslaughter for the 1997 wounding of pastoral counselor Turner Carpenter. Justices Janice M. Holder and William M. Barker concurred. The majority reversed the state Court of Criminal Appeals,which had reversed the jury’s verdict and remanded the case back to the trial court for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Drowota wrote that the insanity defense is controlled by a 1995 statute that amended and narrowed the definition of insanity by requiring proof of insanity by clear and convincing evidence. Prior to the amendment, the prosecution had the burden of proving the defendant’s sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. In 1995, the legislature “fundamentally altered” the insanity defense by requiring that a defendant prove the defense by clear and convincing evidence. The change also provides that the defense applies only when a severe mental disease or defect results in a defendant being “unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness” of the crime.
Flake, 25 years old at the time of the crime, had been charged with attempted first degree murder, but jurors convicted him of a lesser offense, attempted voluntary manslaughter. The victim, a counselor at Central Church in Memphis, had been introduced to Flake by the church pastor, who said Flake was an alcoholic in need of counseling. Flake showed up unannounced at Carpenter’s office while he was counseling a woman and after
leaving for a few minutes, returned and shot Carpenter, who survived. The victim testified there had been no ill will between them.
Psychiatrists and other experts testified that Flake was schizophrenic. With the exception of one prosecution expert, they said Flake was “unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct in shooting the victim.” The facts of Flake’s case, however, such as his fleeing from the scene of the shooting and telling police where to find the gun, indicated that Flake “realized his conduct was wrongful,” Drowota wrote.
In addition, the majority highlighted evidence in the record that suggested defendant was malingering. For example, prior to committing this offense, Flake had not been diagnosed as schizophrenic or reported auditory hallucinations - “hearing voices” - a symptom key to the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
“Where the proof is contested, appellate courts should rarely reverse a jury’s rejection of the insanity defense under this deferential standard of review,” the court said. “. . . Appellate courts do not reweigh the evidence or reassess credibility determinations. These tasks are within the province of the jury. . . . While a jury may not arbitrarily ignore evidence, a jury is not bound to accept the testimony of experts where the evidence is contested.”
In a separate concurring/dissenting opinion, Justices E. Riley Anderson and Adolpho A. Birch, Jr., agreed with the standard of appellate review adopted by the majority, but disagreed with the majority’s application of the standard to Flake’s case.
“. . . Virtually all of the lay and expert testimony established the defendant’s insanity at the time of the offense,” Anderson wrote, adding that insanity was “established by clear and convincing evidence.”
The victim described the shooting as “totally off the wall, weird and crazy,” Anderson wrote. He also testified that when Flake returned to his office, he was “yelling in an ?abnormal’ voice,” and had “changed from a normal appearance to “horrible looking,” “crazed,” and “the devil himself.” In addition, Anderson wrote that all five of the psychiatrists and psychologists who performed evaluations determined that Flake suffered from a serious mental illness, that he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct, and that he was not malingering his mental illness. There was no basis for the jury to “reasonably” have rejected evidence that Flake was insane, Anderson said.
Reversals under the standard unanimously adopted by the court will be “rare,” Anderson and Birch concluded, but upholding the verdict in the Flake case “has made appellate review of a jury’s verdict meaningless and useless.”
Flake also was convicted of two counts of first degree murder for the 1997 shooting deaths of Fred Bizot, who attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Flake, and Mike Fultz. In June, 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the jury’s decision and imposed verdicts of guilty by reason of insanity. The state’s petition to appeal the decision is pending before the Supreme Court.