Montana v. Egelhoff: Due Process and the Right of the Accused to Present Evidence - Essay Example

?Montana v. Egelhoff: Due Process and the Right of the Accused to Present Evidence This paper seeks to critically analyze the decision of the SupremeCourt in the seminal case of Montana v. Egelhoff1 and its implications of the legal landscape covering the right of the accused to present evidence, as part of the due process guarantees of the Constitution. This paper argues that the decision heralds a marked shift in the jurisprudence pertaining to the rights of the accused and may lead to a relaxation of the over-all principle of due process, and second, the decision may also have impacts on judicial appreciation of voluntary intoxication as a factor or consideration in criminal proceedings. This paper begins by giving a brief background of the case itself, including its factual incidents, and the respective decisions of the Montana Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court. After which, it will explore the principle under scrutiny: the right of the accused to present evidence on his behalf and how it has evolved and crystallized over the years. Third, the paper will argue on the implications of the US Supreme Court decision on this principle. Fourth, the paper will reflect on voluntary intoxication and how courts have treated this factor in criminal proceedings. Brief Background On July 12, 1992, the accused James Allen Egelhoff and the victims, Roberta Pavola and John Christianson, who the accused had just struck a friendship with earlier, went to a party in Troy, Montana, where they consumed a large amount of alcohol. After the party, they still went to some bars to drink even further. They left the bars in Christianson’s station wagon, with Egelhoff in the back seat and the two men in the front seat with Christianson driving. There were testimonies from drivers on the highway stating that they saw said vehicle moving erratically, weaving between the road and a side ditch. After midnight, police officers, responding to calls, found the car in a ditch, with Christianson and Pavola dead from gunshot wounds to the head. Egelhoff, meanwhile, was alive and in the backseat, and he was obviously intoxicated and screaming obscenities. According to the Detective, Detective Gassett, Egelhoff was acting wildly and erratically, cursing profusely and even kicking a camera out of the hand of a policeman. After testing him for alcohol ingestion, he registered a .36 blood alcohol content (BAC). There also was gunshot residue in his hands. Egelhoff, when put on the witness stand, stated that he could not remember anything after leaving the party, and had no recollection of the act of firing the gun and killing his companions. During trial, he asserted as follows: Because I was found unconscious and suffering from intoxication measured at .36 one hour after being brought to the hospital, my level of intoxication precluded me from having driven the car or undertaking the physical tasks necessary to have done what the prosecution claimed I had done. In chief, his defense was that he could not have committed Deliberate Homicide, the crime for which he was charged, because he was at the time suffering from an alcohol-induced blackout. This was corroborated by the doctor who examined Egelhoff at the hospital. However, during the trial, the trial court judge asked the jury to take note of Montana Code 45-3-203, stating as follows: A person who is in an intoxicated condition is criminally responsible for his conduct and an intoxicated condition is not a defense to any offense and may not be taken into consideration in determining the existence of a mental state which is an element of the offense, unless the Defendant proves that he did not know that it was an intoxicating substance when he consumed the substance causing the condition. Egelhoff appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, arguing that the elements of the crime of deliberate homicide required the State to prove that he acted “knowingly” and “purposely” and that this burden was not fully dispensed with when the state kept evidence of intoxication from the jury when the issue of his mental state was being threshed out. By virtue of the Jury Instruction, which encapsulated the Montana statute, the trial court restricted Egelhoff’s right to present evidence demonstrating the absence of knowing and purposive action, i.e., evidence demonstrating intoxication. The Montana Supreme Court found for Egelhoff and reversed the trial court. It found that the accused’s due process rights were violated because though Egelhoff was allowed to admit evidence relating to his intoxication, the Jury Instruction prevented this evidence from being used in the ultimate determination of whether or not he acted knowingly or purposely. It cited the decision in Chambers v. Mississippi 2 which defined the fundamental due process right of the accused was “the right to a fair opportunity to defend against the State’s accusations.” Upon elevation to the United States Supreme Court, the decision of the Montana Supreme Court was reversed. The decision, penned by Justice Scalia, held that there was no due process violation when the trial court judge issued an instruction to the Jury to exclude evidence of voluntary intoxication in the determination of mental status or state of mind. One of the main points raised by the Supreme Court was the deference given to the states to administer their own criminal justice systems. The determination of whether or not the restriction of the evidence of the accused is in violation of the Constitutional guarantee of due process should be examined under the crucible test established in the case of New York v Patterson3 where it was held that the right of a state to prescribe and administer its own rules with respect to the criminal justice system “is not subject to proscription under the Due Process Clause unless ‘it offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental’.” Proceeding from this, Justice Scalia examined how different states appreciated the accused’s presentation of evidence of voluntary intoxication and upon noticing that ten states still deny the accused the right to present intoxication evidence, stated that this right could not be fundamental when “one fifth of the states practiced otherwise.” The Court further ruled that the principle being invoked by the accused was of “too recent vintage, and has not received sufficiently uniform and permanent allegiance to qualify as fundamental, especially since it displaces a lengthy common-law tradition which remains supported by valid justifications today.” In Justice Ginsburg’s concurring opinion, it was also stated that the decision did not bend or relax the duty of states to prove the elements of a crime with a quantum of evidence beyond reasonable doubt. The rule disallowing an accused from presenting intoxication evidence in a mens rea question, according to Justice Ginsburg, is not merely an evidentiary rule, but rather an indication of the will of the state to remove voluntary intoxication from one of the issues to be considered in ascertaining the mental state of the accused. Hence, following this logic, the crime of Deliberate Homicide still contains the element of “knowingly” and “purposely” but with voluntary intoxication as a astatutory exception. In sum, by virtue of this Supreme Court decision, the court allowed a man to be convicted for “knowingly” and “purposely” killing another person, despite existing medical evidence showing that the crime had taken place while he was suffering from an alcohol-induced blackout. Jurisprudential Antecedents of the Right of the Accused to Present Evidence on his behalf This paper now turns to examine how the right of the accused to present evidence on his behalf has evolved in case law. During the early days, assertions in favour of the right of the accused to present evidence were not rooted in constitutional principles of due process. Procedural grounds were cited in, for example, the case of Crawford v. United States4. From there, the right to be heard and to present evidence gained traction and such right had been increasingly characterized by the trial courts and affirmed by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right. According, however, to McManus (1997, p. 1245), the beginnings of the case law on this principle were minor steps because the factual antecedents of the early cases involved outright denial of hearings for the accused and there can be no escaping the conclusion that indeed, the right of the accused to be heard and to due process had been violated. It was only in the 1970s when a decision came about that clarified the right to a defense doctrine in cases involving only partial exclusions of evidence. McManus’s description of the case is useful: In Webb v Texas, the Court heard a case involving a claim that the defendant’s due process rights were violated when the trial judge harassed and threatened the defendant’s only witness to the point that the witness refused to testify. The Court overturned the defendant’s conviction on the grounds that the judge’s actions violated the defendant’s due process right to present a defense. The decision was groundbreaking in the jurisprudence of the right to present a defense because the Court’s reasoning relied on the Due Process clause and not on the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment as has been the trend. (1997: 1251-1252). A few years after Webb v. Texas, came the important case of Chambers v. Mississippi, which has been described by Churchwell as a turning point in the due process right of an accused in a criminal proceeding to present evidence for his or her defense. In this case, the Court held that Mississippi’s voucher and hearsay rules conflicted with the right of the accused to present evidence, and the accused’s right should prevail over the state and its powers, consistent with the Due Process clause in the United States Constitution. After the case of Chambers came the case of Crane v. Kentucky,5 which had to do with a minor defendant who alleged that he had been detained in a room without windows, was not allowed to call his mother, and had been forced relentlessly by agents of the state to confess. As a result of this, the defense argues, his confession had been ‘forced’. The court held that considering that the defendant’s defense was the assertion that his confession was coerced, it was “plain that introducing evidence of the physical circumstances that yielded the confession was all but indispensable to any chance of it succeeding.” The Court likewise held that “Whether rooted directly in the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment... or in the Compulsory Process or Confrontation clauses of the Sixth Amendment, the Constitution guarantees criminal defendants a ‘meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense’.” This principle was a tight-clad affirmation the doctrine in the case of California v. Trombetta6 where, while the Court held that states have no obligation to preserve evidence of the defense that could only potentially be important, it also stated that “(u)nder the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, criminal prosecutions must comport with prevailing notions of fundamental fairness. We have long interpreted this standard of fairness to require that criminal defendants be afforded a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.” Reviewing the cases that followed tends to demonstrate the robust character of the right to present evidence. Courts had been traditionally more inclined to uphold this right than to strike it down. McManus summarizes cogently this jurisprudential trajectory, to wit: In sum, these decisions lead to two concrete conclusions regarding the right to present a defense. First, courts acknowledge that the right to present a defense exists under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Second, the proper standard of inquiry is to examine the rationale behind the evidentiary exclusion and to determine if those reasons are substantial enough to justify an infringement on the defendant’s right to present a defense. Important considerations in this standard of inquiry include the relevance and reliability of the evidence in question. It is against this jurisprudential backdrop that we reflect upon and analyze the right of the accused to present evidence for his or her defense, as well as voluntary intoxication as a consideration in a criminal proceeding. Due process It cannot be gainsaid that due process is a fundamental principle in the criminal justice system. It ensures that the rights of the accused are adequately protected, that evidence to convict him or her is evidence obtained without force or duress or violation of law, and that the quest for the rule of law and order does not impinge on the right of the individual to a fair trial. This paper will present three critiques to the decision of the United States Supreme Court to disallow the presentation of evidence of the accused’s state of mental intoxication to refute the allegation that he knowingly and purposely committed the crime of deliberate homicide. The first is that the decision failed to see that there is a clear movement away from the rule disallowing evidence of voluntary intoxication. When Justice Scalia had said that 1/5 of the states still maintained the rule on evidence disallowance, it seemed that he neglected the clear trend of the other 40 states. Indeed, it is not enough to look at the math; it is necessary to look at the movement and direction of the numbers. The facts do demonstrate that while there still are states that persist in disallowing evidence of involuntary intoxication, there are no states that had a rule allowing evidence of voluntary intoxication and then subsequently disallowing it. The direction has always been towards greater liberality and towards widening the due process rights of the accused through a humane interpretation of Constitutional law principles. Justice O’Connor was correct in her dissent when she argued that during the nineteenth century, there were courts, significant in number, that acknowledged that mental state may be compromised when one is in a state of intoxication, and therefore may not be cognizant of the act performed (Clinton, 1976: 711). Therefore, there may be enough weight to argue that evidence of voluntary intoxication should not be excluded as evidence of mental state as this principle has gained some measure of, if not unanimous, historical acceptance. The principles of restorative justice, rather than retributive justice, should illumine interpretation of the laws, and if we are to err, we must err on the side of upholding due process guarantees. The second critique is that disallowing evidence of voluntary intoxication in mental state defences creates the absurd legal fiction of a finding that the crime of deliberate homicide may be committed by one who acted without deliberation, because the state had escaped the burden of proving that he committed the act knowingly and purposely. Moreover, this is a violation of the ruling in the case of In Re Winship7 which held that the “prosecution in a criminal case must prove all elements of a crime beyond reasonable doubt.” Even assuming that Montana, like all other federal states, had the right to craft its own criminal justice laws, it cannot violate this sacrosanct principle in the guise of administering its own penal system and penal regulations. In a sense, it can even be argued that there is a violation of the Equal Protection clause in the Constitution, in that those who are accused of other crimes and are thus similarly situated, enjoy the right to have the state prove all elements of the accusation against them beyond reasonable doubt before they are convicted, whilst those who have committed crimes while under voluntary intoxication in Montana do not. This creates problematic issues and compromises the principle of due process for all accused. Moreover, the standard of “fundamental principle of justice” is too fluid and leaves too much to the discretion of judges. It may open the floodgates to other derogations of the right to Due Process of the accused, because in the opinion of the court, no fundamental principle of justice was violated. How then are judges to determine what constitutes a fundamental principle of justice and what does not? In this case, there even was evidence of a long trajectory of decisions where voluntary intoxication was taken into account in determining men rea, but the court had ignored it. What then do we do in a situation wherein states take shortcuts in prosecution, or given the expedient needs of law and order restrict the right of the accused to present evidence or to confront his or her accuser, and the court determines that there is no “fundamental principle of justice” that is at stake, and state autonomy must therefore be maintained? What remains sacrosanct, and how do we decide what Constitutional principles do we insulate from the vagaries of modern governance and the popular clamor to protect peace and order? As a final point, the decision may run counter to modern findings tending to demonstrate that alcoholism is a disease and that taking it in large quantities may be symptomatic of an addiction more in the nature of an illness that cannot be prevented by the unilateral will of the person suffering from it rather than a behavior that can be controlled and for which the alcoholic may be liable. While admittedly the accused in this case may be a party drinker and not an illness-stricken alcoholic, the unjust consequences of this ruling may have implications on those who are suffering from alcoholism and require legitimate treatment. In sum, the net effect of this decision is to subordinate the right of the accused to due process – a right that is fundamental and cherished – to the moral judgment of the state and its determination on the propriety of the behaviour of its citizens. In its desire to promote an antiquated morality and in its righteous desire to reduce alcoholism in the state by not making it exculpatory, it is in effect creating a slippery slope that renders other Constitutional rights vulnerable. Other areas where voluntary intoxication is a consideration This part now looks at how this decision will have implications on the way in which voluntary intoxication is perceived and appreciated in criminal proceedings, as perhaps in cases wherein a rape victim is found to have been voluntarily intoxicated at the time of the act of rape, and there is no way to ascertain if she had given consent.  Justice Scalia's decision inevitably placed a moral judgment on the act of voluntary intoxication. It is a decision predicated on the theory that a person so intoxicated by his own doing is in that condition by virtue of a rashness in is behaviour and therefore he cannot invoke the protections of the law that are available to those who "behave properly" and in accordance with society's rules of conduct. Carrying ts moral judgment from drunk men who commit homicide and claim not to remember anything to intoxicated university students who end up being sexually abused by men who claim to misread their signals and the problem becomes immediately evident. It becomes a matter of a court proxying its prejudices and assigning value judgments.  There is no doubt that in situations where a person alleging rape had been forcibly intoxicated by her alleged rapist before commencing sexual intercourse without her consent, both the jury and the society at large will agree with minimum dispute that the crime of rape had indeed been committed. The situation becomes complicated when the victim becomes intoxicated by her own doing, and consumes a quantity of alcohol that compromises capacity to give consent. There becomes a dispute as to whether or not consent was given and whether there was enough to engender a reasonable belief on the part of the defendant that consent had indeed been given. But beyond the thorny legal issues concerning the threshold of consent and capacity, there are sociological issues that emerge. These are issues that touch upon socially-constructed notions of how women should behave and value-laden idealised assumptions of “proper women” Whilst there are differing opinions as to whether or consent is a state of mind8, or it is an action9, either way, alcohol ingestion makes consent problematic. If consent is a state of mind, alcohol at a certain level addles and distorts the mind in a state of inebriation. If consent is an action, alcohol has behaviour-altering effects and can impair speech and physical movement in such a manner that consent becomes ambiguous. To use the definition given by Cowan, “to be in a state of intoxication means that one’s mental and physical capacities are substantially altered from one’s ‘sober’ state, through the ingestion of intoxicating substances. (2009: p. 904). Perhaps best articulating the conundrum is Schulhofer (1998: pp. 14-15) in his book entitled Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of the Law: “‘The law’s willingness to find consent in cases of severe alcohol impairment should be considered intolerable, but a standard that suggests rape anytime alcohol plays a part in sexual consent would be intolerable as well”. How do we draw the line? How do we protect women from predators who take advantage of their vulnerable state, whilst at the same time ensure that the courts are not used to litigate “morning-after” regret? Obviously, when a complainant is incapacitated then there is no question. A man taking advantage of her incapacitated state is a rapist, even if prior to her incapacitation she had given indications that she was willing to engage in consensual sex. The question comes in when a woman has capacity to give consent, but her capacity to articulate that consent becomes impaired by the temporary effects of alcohol after voluntary intoxication. Looking at it from the perspective of the due process of the defendant first, it does not seem fair that impaired capacity to articulate consent be interpreted as absence of consent. There are conclusive medical findings to the effect that alcohol consumption does reduce inhibition and make physical signals and verbal signals rather difficult to discern. Also, there seems to be an inherent inequity in the formulation that sexual intercourse whilst extremely drunk but not incapacitated can make a case for rape. More often than not, both would be engaging in alcohol drinking during a fun night of revelry, so it is not only a case of diminished capacity to articulate consent, but also diminished capacity to appreciate consent that should be taken into consideration. Moreover, evidence-wise, it can be argued it is also difficult to get an accurate testimony of the incident, considering the effects of alcohol on memory. This goes into the whole issue of “mens rea” – what happened may have been unfortunate and regrettable, but was it rape? Can it really be said that the defendant had sex with a woman who he had reasonably believed to have said no to his advances, or it might it have been a case of alcohol impairing only judgment but not consent? At the same time, moral judgement kicks in. “She deserved it, she was drunk.” The social attitudes surrounding women who voluntarily drink appear to support this notion of deserving victim, an unfortunate image that is reproduced over and over again through various processes. In a groundbreaking work, Finch and Munro (2006: 303) looked at the attitudes of mock jurors towards the consent provisions in the Sexual Offence Act. They found that for some participants, ingesting alcohol on the part of the woman victim ‘was sufficient to absolve the defendant of all responsibility to the victim’. Conclusion The case of Egelhoff indeed paints very serious problems, both for due process and for cases where voluntary intoxication is an issue. This paper had argued that it is a step in the wrong direction and that its jurisprudential implications will, unfortunately, have adverse effects that will be felt for a long time. References Clinton, C. (1976). “The Right to Present a Defense: An Emergent Constitutional Guarantee in Criminal Trials”. Indiana Law Review. Volume 9:711. Cowan, S. (2009). “The Trouble with Drink: Intoxication, (In)capacity, and the Evaporation of Consent to Sex.” Akron Law Review. Vol. 41, 899-922. Finch, E. & Munro, V. (2005) “Juror Stereotypes and Blame Attribution in Rape Cases Involving Intoxicants: The Findings of a Pilot Study”, 45 Brit. J. Criminol. 25, 30. McManus, R. (1997). “Montana v. Egelhoff: Voluntary Intoxication, Morality and the Constitution.” American University Law Review. Vol. 46. Pp 1245-1270. Schulhofer, S. (1998). Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Read More