Stanley Forman Reed

“ More precisely, there are persons who, while not totally insane, possess such low mental powers as to be incapable of the deliberation and premeditation requisite to statutory first degree murder. Yet under the rule adopted by the court below, the jury must either condemn such persons to death on the false premise that they possess the mental requirements of a first degree murderer or free them completely from criminal responsibility and turn them loose among society. ”

“ A deed may be gruesome and not be premeditated. Concededly there was no motive for the killing prior to the inciting 'you black nigger.' The tone in which these words were uttered evidently pulled the trigger of Fisher's emotions, and under adequate instructions the jury might have found that what these words conveyed to Fisher's ears unhinged his self-control. While there may well have been murder, deliberate premeditation, for which alone Congress has provided the death sentence, may have been wanting. ”

“ For the real question, as I see it, is whether in view of the act of Congress defining murder in the first degree for prosecutions in the District and in light of the particular circumstances of this case, the trial court properly sent the case to the jury. That is a very different question from whether the court's charge was unimpeachable as an abstract statement of law. For Fisher is not the name of a theoretical problem. We are not here dealing with an abstract man who killed an abstract woman under abstract circumstances and received an abstract trial on abstract issues. ”

“ That the charge requested by the defendant and denied did not go to this issue of premeditation unambiguously but in an awkward and oblique way did not lessen the responsibility of the trial judge to bring this issue-it was the crucial issue-sharply and vividly to the jury's mind. If their minds had been so focused, the jury might well have found that the successive steps that culminated in Miss Reardon's death could not properly be judged in isolation. ”

“ Throughout this melancholy affair the insistence was on claims of Fisher's mental deficiencies and the law's duty to take into consideration the skeptical views of modern psychiatry regarding the historic legal tests for insanity. I cannot but believe that this has diverted attention from the more obvious and conventional but controlling inquiry regarding the absence or presence of the requisite premeditation, under the circumstances of this case. ”

“ Men ought not to go to their doom because this Court thinks that conflicting legal conclusions of an abstract nature seem to have been 'nicely balanced' by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The deference which this Court pays to that Court's adjudications in ordinary cases involving issues essentially of minor or merely local importance seems out of place when the action of this Court, no matter how phrased, sustains a death sentence at the seat of our Government as a result of a trial over which this Court, by direction of Congress, has the final reviewing power. ”

“ A. S. Worthington, pointed to the distinction in his argument: 'In jurisdictions where murder is divided into two degrees-murder in the first degree requiring deliberation and pree ditation; in other words, actual malice-it has been frequently held that evidence of mental excitement resulting from drunkenness and, perhaps, also of other abnormal conditions of the mind not amounting to insanity, may reduce an unprovoked homicide to murder in the second degree; but it has always been held that such evidence cannot of itself reduce the crime to manslaughter.' Id. ”

“ There is no absolute or clear-cut dichotomous division of the inhabitants of this world into the sane and the insane. 'Between the two extremes of 'sanity' and 'insanity' lies every shade of disordered or deficient mental condition, grading imperceptibly one into another.' Weihofen, 'Partial Insanity and Criminal Intent,' 24 Ill.L.Rev. ”

“ Whatever the line of defence adopted by counsel at the trial of a prisoner, we are of opinion that it is for the judge to put such questions as appear to him properly to arise upon the evidence, even though counsel may not have raised some question himself. ”

“ The fact that a defending counsel does not stress an alternative case before the jury (which he may well feel it difficult to do without prejudicing the main defence) does not relieve the judge from the duty of directing the jury to consider the alternative, if there is material before the jury which would justify a direction that they should consider it. ”

“ Congress in 1901 enacted a code for the District in which it joined the growing movement of dividing murder into degrees. [5] Congress confined the death sentence to killing by premeditation; it required designed homicide, previous deliberation that life was to be taken before the United States would take life in retribution. [6] The division of murder into degrees arose from the steadily weakened hold of capital punishment on the conscience of mankind. ”

“ Here we have more than an exercise in statutory construction or in local law. It is a capital case involving not a question of innocence or guilt but rather a consideration of the proper standards to be used in judging the degree of guilt. ”

“ The importance of the screaming is a key to the tragedy. It is difficult to disbelieve Fisher's account that he never wanted to kill Miss Reardon but wanted only to stop her screaming, which unnerved him. ”

“ In this case it may be that the difficulty of presenting the alternative defences of accident and manslaughter may have actuated counsel in saying very little about manslaughter, but if we come to the conclusion, as we do, that there was some evidence-we say no more than that-upon which a question ought to have been left to the jury as to the crime being manslaughter only, we think that this verdict of murder cannot stand."↑ The only authority adduced for what the Court terms long-established practice is United States v. ”

“ United States Supreme Court
328 U.S. 463
Fisher v. United States
Argued: Dec. 5, 1945. --- Decided: June 10, 1946
Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER dissenting.
A shocking crime puts law to its severest test. Law triumphs over natural impulses aroused by such a crime only if guilt be ascertained by due regard for those indispensable safeguards which our civilization has evolved for the ascertainment of guilt. It is not enough that a trial goes through the forms of law. ”