State v. Roberts, Minn.S.Ct., 3/16/2016. Mr. Roberts stabbed to death two of his family members in the (apparently incorrect) belief that he was under attack from them, that one of the practiced witchcraft, and that he was in a battle with them "for his soul." After the stabbings, Mr. Roberts disposed of some of the evidence and drove west, getting as far as Waterloo, Iowa where he rolled the car. Mr. Roberts then fled on foot, but police caught up with him a few blocks away. He refused an officer's command to get on the ground, although he stated that he understood the order. Later, at the jail in Waterloo, Mr. Roberts screamed inaudibly at an officer and then fell asleep. Still later, he cooperated with various commands given him, including one to change into a jail jumpsuit.
Mr. Roberts waived a jury and asserted a mental health defense in the second part of the trial. Minnesota still adheres to a nineteenth century English House of Lords ruling, M'Naghten's Case, 8 Eng. Rep. 718, 722, 10 Cl. & Fin. 200, 210 (1843). The Lords decreed that to establish an insanity defense:
the defendant must prove that “at the time of the committing of the act, [the defendant] was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
The trial court found that Mr. Roberts suffered from a mental illness and that he knew the "nature" of his acts, in the sense that he knew that he was stabbing members of his family multiple times. So, that got Justice G. Barry Anderson to that last part of M'Naghten, knowing the what he was doing was wrong. Whether Mr. Roberts knew that what he was doing was wrong is not a legal question; it's a moral one. State v. Ulm, 326 N.W.2d 159, 161 (Minn. 1982).
The trial court and Justice Anderson mostly relied upon Mr. Roberts' conduct before and after the stabbings to conclude that he had not shown that "he did not know that his conduct was morally wrong at the time of the murders." Just how anyone is capable of making this determination isn't really explained. Rather the court just glosses over the very distinction that Ulm requires in order to get to this conclusion. Doing so thereby ignores that whether actions are "moral" is a subjective determination. Mr. Roberts could just as likely concluded that stabbing his family members to death was unlawful but that he was morally obligated to do so because of, say, the practice of witchcraft.
Everyone agreed that a determination of Mr. Robert's "mind set" at the time of the murders would be based upon circumstantial evidence. (Had Mr. Roberts been "actively psychotic" at the time of his apprehension and initial police questioning this may have been direct evidence of that mind set.) The "circumstantial evidence" test that the court so recently adopted, State v. Al-Naseer, 788 N.W.2d 469 (Minn. 2010), was, however, never in play. Instead, Justice Anderson applied a "clearly erroneous" standard to the trial court's determination.
