Also known as: mental defects · mental deficiency
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
A mental condition of illness or cognitive impairment. In tort law the condition does not relieve an adult actor from liability for conduct that falls below the standard of a reasonable person under like circumstances.
Marcos owns a retail store and receives repeated complaints that the entrance step is crumbling. He takes no action to repair or warn customers. When Lena trips and breaks her leg, Marcos's documented intellectual disability does not lower the standard applied to his conduct.
Jordan, a city bus driver with a history of psychogenic blackouts, feels disoriented during his route yet keeps driving. He later blacks out and collides with Alex's car. Jordan's mental condition supplies no defense to the claim that he failed to meet the ordinary reasonable-driver standard.
In late December 1966, appellant Leroy Powell was arrested and charged with being found in a state of intoxication in a public place in violation of Texas Penal Code, Art. 477 (1952). He was tried in the Corporation Court of Austin, Texas, found guilty, and fined twenty dollars. He appealed to the County Court at Law No. 1 of Travis County, Texas, where a trial de novo was held. At the county court trial without a jury, the defense presented testimony from psychiatrist Dr. David Wade, who had examined Powell and testified that he is a chronic alcoholic with an uncontrollable compulsion to drink and that he loses the power to control his drinking. Powell testified that he works at a tavern shining shoes, makes about twelve dollars a week which he uses to buy wine, drinks wine every day, gets drunk about once a week, and usually goes to sleep in public places such as the sidewalk when drunk. The arresting officer testified that Powell staggered when he walked, that his speech was slurred, and that he smelled strongly of alcohol. The trial court entered findings of fact that chronic alcoholism is a disease which destroys the afflicted person's will power to resist the constant, excessive consumption of alcohol, that a chronic alcoholic does not appear in public by his own volition but under a compulsion symptomatic of the disease of chronic alcoholism, and that Powell is a chronic alcoholic who is afflicted with the disease. The court nevertheless convicted Powell and fined him fifty dollars. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction. Powell appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which noted probable jurisdiction. The record shows Powell had been convicted of public intoxication approximately one hundred times since 1949 and that he works shining shoes, earns about twelve dollars a week, and uses his earnings to buy wine, getting drunk about once a week usually in public places.
View caseChapman owns a store and ignores repeated warnings that a display case is unstable. A customer is injured when it falls. Chapman's evidence of mental defect does not alter the reasonable-person standard applied to her failure to act.
Ruth Elizabeth Chapman and Thomas LeRoy Teale were convicted in a California state court upon a charge that they robbed, kidnaped, and murdered a bartender. Chapman was sentenced to life imprisonment and Teale to death. At trial both petitioners chose not to testify. The prosecutor took full advantage of a provision in the California Constitution allowing comment on a defendant's failure to testify, filling his argument to the jury from beginning to end with numerous references to their silence and inferences of guilt. The trial court also charged the jury that it could draw adverse inferences from petitioners' failure to testify. The trial took place before this Court decided Griffin v. California. On appeal the California Supreme Court acknowledged that petitioners had been denied a federal constitutional right by the comments on their silence but affirmed applying the State's harmless-error provision. The Supreme Court granted certiorari limited to these questions: where there is a violation of the rule of Griffin v. California, can the error be held to be harmless, and if so, was the error harmless in this case.
View caseA physician owns a clinic and fails to warn patients of a known hazard in the waiting-room floor. A visitor is injured. The physician's mental defect supplies no defense to the claim that conduct fell below the reasonable-person standard.
Mary Doe, a 22-year-old married Georgia resident who was nine weeks pregnant when the complaint was filed, joined twenty-three other individuals and two nonprofit corporations in filing this federal action in the Northern District of Georgia against the state attorney general, the Fulton County district attorney, and the Atlanta chief of police. The plaintiffs sought declaratory and injunctive relief against enforcement of Ga. Code Ann. §§ 26-1201 to 26-1203, which made abortion a felony except when a licensed physician determined in his best clinical judgment that continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the woman's life or seriously and permanently injure her health, that the fetus would likely be born with a grave permanent defect, or that the pregnancy resulted from forcible or statutory rape, and only after satisfying multiple procedural conditions including advance written request, hospital committee approval, performance in an accredited licensed hospital, and Georgia residency. Doe alleged that she had three children already placed in foster care or for adoption, had been a patient at the state mental hospital, lived in poverty with her reconciled husband who worked only sporadically, and had been advised by her physician that an abortion would be safer for her health than carrying the pregnancy to term, yet her application to the Grady Memorial Hospital abortion committee was denied because her situation did not fit the statutory exceptions. A three-judge district court tried the case on the pleadings and interrogatories, held that only Doe presented a justiciable controversy, invalidated the limitations on reasons for abortion and the residency requirement, upheld the hospital and committee requirements, granted declaratory relief, and denied injunctive relief; both sides appealed and the Supreme Court postponed probable jurisdiction.
View caseAlexander operates a vehicle despite known cognitive impairment and causes a collision. The injured party sues in negligence. Alexander's mental defect does not lower the ordinary reasonable-driver standard of care.
On the evening of June 4, 1968, five white United States Marine Lieutenants in formal dress uniforms and a woman named Barbara Kelly entered a hamburger shop in Washington, D.C., around 2:40 a.m. after a night out. They ordered food at the take-out counter and noticed three Black men—appellants Alexander and Murdock and Cornelius Frazier—sitting at the other end of the counter. According to prosecution witnesses, a staring contest between Lieutenant Kramer and Alexander led to Alexander tapping Kramer on the shoulder, asking him to step outside, and making a threat. After a racial epithet from Lieutenant King, Alexander drew a .38 caliber revolver. Murdock then reentered and drew his own revolver, after which shots were fired, killing Lieutenants King and Lesnick and wounding Kramer and Kelly. Alexander, Murdock, and Frazier fled in Alexander's car, with Murdock firing additional shots from the window. They were stopped by police within a few blocks, and two revolvers were recovered from the car floorboard. Defense witnesses Frazier and Murdock testified that the Marines were drunk and aggressive, and Murdock claimed he fired in self-defense fearing for his life. At a joint jury trial in February 1969, both were convicted of carrying a dangerous weapon and four counts of assault with a dangerous weapon; Murdock was also convicted of two counts of second-degree murder. Murdock's trial was bifurcated; after the guilt phase, a separate hearing on criminal responsibility was held in November 1969 before the same jury, which found him criminally responsible. Alexander received consecutive sentences totaling five to twenty-three years, and Murdock twenty years to life. Both appealed their convictions to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which heard argument on December 21, 1970, and issued its decision on April 21, 1972.
View caseThe Tison brothers manage a property with a known dangerous condition and take no steps to remedy it. A visitor is injured. Their mental limitations do not relieve them from liability measured by the reasonable-person standard.
In July 1978, Gary Tison, serving a life sentence for murder, planned an escape from the Arizona State Prison at Florence with the assistance of his wife, sons Donald, Ricky, and Raymond, his brother Joseph, and other relatives. The family assembled an arsenal of weapons, and Gary insisted that his cellmate Randy Greenawalt, also a convicted murderer, join the escape. On July 30, 1978, Ricky and Raymond Tison entered the prison carrying an ice chest filled with guns, armed their father and Greenawalt, and the group locked guards and visitors in a storage closet before fleeing in a Ford Galaxy automobile. After abandoning the Ford and switching to a Lincoln with a flat tire, the group traveled through the desert. When another tire blew out, they decided to flag down a passing motorist to steal a car. Raymond stood in front of the Lincoln while the others hid armed by the side of the road. A Mazda occupied by John Lyons, his wife Donnelda, their 2-year-old son Christopher, and 15-year-old niece Theresa Tyson stopped to help. The Tisons and Greenawalt forced the Lyons family into the Lincoln, transferred belongings, and drove to a remote desert location. At the site, Gary Tison shot the radiator of the Lincoln to disable it. The family was ordered to stand in the headlights. John Lyons begged for water and mercy. Ricky and Raymond went to retrieve water from the Mazda. While they were doing so, Gary Tison and Greenawalt shot and killed the four victims with repeated shotgun blasts. The sons did not participate in the shooting but continued the flight with the group in the Mazda. Theresa Tyson crawled away but died in the desert. Several days later, the group was apprehended after a shootout at a police roadblock. Donald Tison was killed, Gary Tison escaped and later died of exposure, and Ricky, Raymond, and Greenawalt were captured. The State tried Ricky and Raymond individually for capital murder under Arizona's felony-murder and accomplice liability statutes, as well as armed robbery, kidnapping, and car theft. They were convicted and sentenced to death after a capital sentencing proceeding where the judge found aggravating factors including pecuniary gain and heinousness, and no statutory mitigating factors, though noting their youth and lack of prior records. On direct appeal, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences. After this Court's decision in Enmund v. Florida, the petitioners sought postconviction relief, but the Arizona Supreme Court again upheld the sentences, finding that the petitioners had "intended to kill" based on their anticipation that lethal force might be used. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the application of Enmund.
View caseNo. An adult with mental illness or cognitive impairment remains subject to the ordinary reasonable-person standard. The rule preserves an objective benchmark that protects injured third parties and avoids difficult inquiries into degrees of impairment.
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Physical disability receives an individualized standard that asks what a reasonable person with the same disability would have done. Mental deficiency receives no such adjustment for adults. The objective reasonable-person standard continues to apply.
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The rule prioritizes compensation for victims who cannot evaluate an actor's hidden limitations. It also promotes predictability, encourages treatment and accommodations, and avoids complex evidentiary disputes over the precise effect of any given mental condition.
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Yes. The absence of a prior diagnosis does not change the analysis. The objective standard focuses on whether the conduct conformed to that of a reasonable person, not on the defendant's subjective awareness of any impairment.
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…California Supreme Court noted that Chapman, against whom the evidence was less strong, had keyed her defense to evidence of her mental defect, a subject upon which the comment had not touched. From this discriminating analysis it was concluded that another result was not "reasonably probable" absent the erroneous comments. I…