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State v. Flake8/5/2003
at the jury reasonably found that the defendant's insanity at the time of the offenses was not established by clear and convincing evidence. I disagree.
My review of the evidence in the record indicates that the lay and expert testimony overwhelmingly established that the defendant suffered from the severe mental illness of paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of his conduct when he tragically shot and killed Mike Fultz and Fred Bizot on April 5, 1997. See Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-501(a) (1997). I would hold that no reasonable trier of fact could have failed to find that the defendant's insanity at the time of the offenses was established by clear and convincing evidence. I would affirm the Court of Criminal Appeals' judgment, and I therefore dissent.
I.
Before July of 1995, the defense of insanity in Tennessee required evidence that "as a result of a mental disease or defect," a defendant "lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of [his or her] conduct or to conform that conduct to the requirements of the law." Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-501 (repealed 1995). Under this statutory standard, if evidence at trial raised a reasonable doubt as to the defendant's sanity, the prosecution had the burden of proving the defendant's sanity beyond a reasonable doubt." State v. Flake, 88 S.W.3d 540, 550 (Tenn. 2002) ("Flake I").
Effective July 1, 1995, the legislature fundamentally altered and significantly narrowed the defense of insanity in Tennessee. See Flake I, 88 S.W.3d at 540-41. The defense of insanity now requires that a defendant, "as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of such defendant's acts." Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-501(a) (1997). Moreover, the statute now places the burden on the defendant to establish the affirmative defense by "clear and convincing evidence." Id. As we said in Flake I, "clear and convincing evidence means evidence in which there is no serious or substantial doubt about the correctness of the conclusions drawn from the evidence." Flake I, 88 S.W.3d at 551.
In Flake I, the Court was confronted with determining the proper standard of review to account for the revised and substantially narrowed statutory framework governing insanity. Flake I, 88 S.W.3d at 551. The Court unanimously adopted a standard under which a jury verdict rejecting the insanity defense should be reversed only when an appellate court, viewing the evidence most favorably to the prosecution, concludes that no reasonable trier of fact could have failed to find that the defendant's insanity at the time of the offense was established by clear and convincing evidence. Id. at 553-54. The Court majority believed that "this standard does not totally insulate the jury's finding from appellate review" but instead "enhances appellate review by virtue of its similarity to the familiar sufficiency standard which appellate courts are accustomed to applying." Id. at 554.
Although I concurred in the adoption of the standard of review in Flake I, I disagreed with the majority's application of it to the facts and circumstances in that case, and I dissented on the basis that "virtually all of the lay and expert testimony established the defendant's insanity at the time of the offense." Id. at 557 (Anderson, J., dissenting) (emphasis in original). Moreover, I wrote that "by upholding the jury's verdict under the facts and circumstances of [that] case, the majority has made appellate review of a jury's verdict meaningless and useless." Id. at 560 (Anderson, J., dissenting). In my view, the majority's application of the standard to the evidence in the
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