CCA ruling let juries hear about mental impairment, but not always from the mentally impaired

A couple of notable items from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals related to mental illness:

The search for diminished capacity in Texas law
First, from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, Martha Deller has the story, "Appellate rulings sought to set guidelines for mental impairment defenses" (May 10), which opens:

No one knows for certain why a Tarrant County jury rejected a defense related to post-traumatic stress disorder in the murder trial of Marine veteran Eric Acevedo.

But legal experts agree that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals needs to rule more definitively whether evidence of mental impairment -- short of the tougher insanity defense -- is admissible in deciding guilt or innocence, and if so, when and how it can be used.

Texas hasn't allowed jurors to consider mental health issues, short of insanity, in determining a defendant's guilt. Some other states, though, allow juries to consider whether a mental affliction renders a person incapable of forming the intent to commit a crime.

Acevedo's attorney, Jim Lane, said that Texas needs a way to take into account the mental impairments suffered by an increasing number of combat veterans.

"Insanity has such a different meaning than combat PTSD," he said. "I'd hate to think that everyone coming home from Iraq is crazy, but there is diminished capacity for a combat veteran suffering from PTSD. There should be a niche for that."

Prosecutors fear that allowing mental health defenses could overwhelm the court system with such claims. But an official of the Vietnam Veterans of America says the opposite is true.

The story includes this description of recent CCA rulings on the topic:

Richardson attorney Lydia Brandt concedes that justices have not accepted the diminished-capacity defense per se.

She has argued appeals of lower court rulings disallowing testimony on mental impairment. In one case, the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2005 ruled for the first time that mental impairments can be introduced into evidence. But the justices also said that the trial judge in the case properly allowed the testimony but not the expert's opinion that the man lacked the capacity to intentionally commit the crime.

The court reaffirmed that opinion in 2008, reversing the conviction of a man who shot at police officers. The court said the trial judge erred in not allowing testimony that the man was mentally impaired and believed that the officers were Muslims.

Brandt said the law is still evolving through court opinions, which are making it increasingly clear that all types of mental impairment -- not just PTSD -- are admissible in criminal trials.

But she said she is not surprised that most juries do not accept the mental-impairment defense, just as they haven't accepted the insanity defense.

"I don't think people know what intent means," she said. "I don't think district attorneys know. They're turning it into a strict liability crime. He did it; therefore he intended to do it. That's why prosecutors are so adamantly against a diminished-capacity doctrine."

Judges may deny right of self-representation to the mentally ill
Meanwhile, Liberty and Justice for Y'all brings word of a unanimous CCA case ruling that defendants may be competent to stand trial but incompetent to represent themselves pro se. They were following the lead of SCOTUS in Indiana v. Edwards, a case with which I strongly disagreed which I earlier described thusly:

According to the New York Times, Justice Stephen Breyer's decision emphasized the "spectacle" of letting mentally ill people pontificate on their own behalf in open court:

Noting that the court has referred to the right to self-representation as an aspect of individual dignity, Justice Breyer said dignity was lacking in the “spectacle that could well result” from a mentally ill defendant’s efforts, which he said were “at least as likely to prove humiliating as ennobling.”

Well, Justice Breyer - what about the "spectacle" of filling up our prisons with mentally ill people so deranged that merely allowing them to articulate their own defense to charges against them is too "humiliating" for the courts to bear?

Color me unsurprised that this is one SCOTUS decision where the Texas CCA won't buck and kick against judicial activism by the feds or assert their federalist-based authority to differ with the Supreme Court.

Here's the bottom line for me: If the defendant can't meaningfully participate in his or her own defense, they're not competent to stand trial. If they can, there's little remaining argument for denying them the right to proceed pro se. SCOTUS and the CCA want to have it both ways, so I'll repeat here what I said of the SCOTUS case: "This was an activist decision by judges for judges to make their jobs and lives easier, leaving for some other day any latent concern for either the rights of mentally ill people or the righteousness and public policy consequences of using the criminal justice system as de facto asylums."

UPDATE: A reader sent in this request via email:

I'd like to read your spin on this entry "Judges may deny right of self-representation to the mentally ill," and applying it to the Scott Panetti (Death Row) debacle.

That is a tough hair to split. I'm still working on it.

I responded:

Thanks a lot. On Panetti, I'd reiterate what I said in the post: "If the defendant can't meaningfully participate in his or her own defense, they're not competent to stand trial. If they can, there's little remaining argument for denying them the right to proceed pro se."

And to me (though I'm not a lawyer), the converse would be true. If a judge thinks a defendant incompetent to proceed pro se, they're not going to be able to meaningfully participate in their own defense.

Just pick: They're competent or not. The answer can't (or at least shouldn't) be "both."