perfect defense

In 1930, Dick, a citizen of Texas who had resided in Mexico at the time the insurance policy was issued and assigned to him, brought an action in a Texas state court against Compania General Anglo-Mexicana de Seguros S.A., a Mexican corporation, seeking recovery on a fire insurance policy for the total loss of a tug. Jurisdiction over the Mexican corporation was asserted through garnishment by ancillary writs issued against The Home Insurance Company and Franklin Fire Insurance Company, New York corporations that had reinsured portions of the risk. Service on the garnishees was effected by serving their local agents in Texas, who had been appointed pursuant to Texas statutes requiring foreign corporations to appoint such agents to do business in the state. The Mexican corporation had never been admitted to do business in Texas, had not done business there, and had not authorized anyone to receive service of process in the state. The policy had been issued by the Mexican company in Mexico to Bonner of Tampico, Mexico, and was there assigned to Dick prior to the loss. It covered the vessel only in certain Mexican waters, with the premium paid in Mexico, and the loss payable in Mexico City in Mexican funds or their equivalent elsewhere. The policy contained a provision requiring that any judicial suit for a claim under the policy be filed within one year from the date of the damage, a term consistent with Mexican law to which the policy was expressly subject. At all relevant times prior to the loss, Dick actually resided in Mexico, although his permanent residence was in Texas. The contracts of reinsurance were effected by correspondence between the Mexican company in Mexico and the New York companies in New York, with nothing under those contracts done in Texas. This suit was not commenced until more than one year after the date of the loss. In the trial court, the garnishees raised a defense based on the one-year limitation in the policy. Dick demurred, relying on Article 5545 of the Texas Revised Civil Statutes, which prohibited stipulations limiting the time to sue to less than two years. The trial court sustained the demurrer and entered judgment against the garnishees. On appeal, the Court of Civil Appeals and the Supreme Court of Texas affirmed the judgment, treating the policy provision as equivalent to a foreign statute of limitation and holding the Texas statute applicable to the remedy in Texas courts. The garnishees appealed to the United States Supreme Court, asserting that the Texas statute as construed and applied violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the contract clause. Dick moved to dismiss the appeal for want of jurisdiction. The garnishees also filed a petition for a writ of certiorari. The Supreme Court postponed consideration of its jurisdiction and the certiorari petition to the hearing on the merits.

In the early hours of June 21, 2000, Officer Jeffrey Moritz of the Flagstaff Police responded in uniform to complaints that a pickup truck with loud music blaring was circling a residential block. When he located the truck, the officer turned on the emergency lights and siren of his marked patrol car. This prompted petitioner Eric Clark, the truck’s driver (then 17), to pull over. Officer Moritz got out of the patrol car and told Clark to stay where he was. Less than a minute later, Clark shot the officer. The officer died soon after but not before calling the police dispatcher for help. Clark ran away on foot but was arrested later that day with gunpowder residue on his hands. The gun that killed the officer was found nearby, stuffed into a knit cap. Clark was charged with first-degree murder under Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §13–1105(A)(3) for intentionally or knowingly killing a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. In March 2001, Clark was found incompetent to stand trial and was committed to a state hospital for treatment. Two years later the same trial court found his competence restored and ordered him to be tried. Clark waived his right to a jury, and the case was heard by the court. At trial, Clark did not contest that he shot the officer or that the officer died. He relied on his own undisputed paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the incident to deny that he had the specific intent to shoot an officer or knowledge that he was doing so. The prosecutor offered circumstantial evidence that Clark knew the victim was a police officer. The prosecutor also offered testimony indicating that Clark had previously stated he wanted to shoot police and had lured the victim to the scene to kill him. In presenting the defense case, Clark claimed mental illness. He sought to introduce it for two purposes. First, he raised the affirmative defense of insanity. This put the burden on himself to prove by clear and convincing evidence that at the time of the crime he was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that he did not know the criminal act was wrong. Second, he aimed to rebut the prosecution’s evidence of the requisite mens rea. Ruling that Clark could not rely on evidence bearing on insanity to dispute the mens rea, the trial court cited the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Mott. That decision refused to allow psychiatric testimony to negate specific intent. It held that Arizona does not allow evidence of a mental disorder short of insanity to negate the mens rea element of a crime. As to his insanity, Clark presented lay testimony describing his increasingly bizarre behavior over the year before the shooting. This included testimony that Clark thought Flagstaff was populated with aliens trying to kill him and that bullets were the only way to stop them. A psychiatrist testified that Clark was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with delusions about aliens when he killed the officer. The psychiatrist concluded that Clark was incapable of luring the officer or understanding right from wrong and was thus insane at the time of the killing. In rebuttal, the State’s psychiatrist gave his opinion that Clark’s paranoid schizophrenia did not keep him from appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct before and after the shooting. The judge then issued a first-degree murder verdict. The judge found that Clark had not established that his schizophrenia distorted his perception of reality so severely that he did not know his actions were wrong. Clark moved to vacate the judgment and life sentence. He argued that Arizona’s insanity test and its Mott rule each violate due process. The trial court denied the motion. Affirming, the Arizona Court of Appeals held that the State’s insanity scheme was consistent with due process. The court read Mott as barring the trial court’s consideration of evidence of Clark’s mental illness and capacity directly on the element of mens rea. The Supreme Court of Arizona denied further review. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.

In 1987, petitioner Alexis Geier, then four months old, was a passenger in a 1987 Honda Accord that crashed into a tree. The car was equipped with manual shoulder and lap belts but had no airbag. The lap and shoulder belt did not prevent Alexis from striking her head on the dashboard, and she suffered serious injuries as a result. Alexis and her parents sued the car's manufacturer, American Honda Motor Company, Inc., and its American distributor, Honda of America Manufacturing, Inc., in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. They claimed that American Honda had designed its car negligently and defectively because it lacked a driver's side airbag. American Honda moved for summary judgment on the ground that the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and FMVSS 208 preempted the lawsuit. The District Court dismissed the lawsuit. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the dismissal. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide whether the Act or the safety standard preempts a no-airbag lawsuit. FMVSS 208, promulgated under the Act, required auto manufacturers to equip some but not all of their 1987 and later model vehicles with passive restraints. The standard required manufacturers to equip 10 percent of their 1987 vehicles, 25 percent of their 1988 vehicles, 40 percent of their 1989 vehicles, and 100 percent of their 1990 and later vehicles with one of several different passive restraint systems, including airbags, automatic safety belts, or other passive restraints providing at least the same level of crash protection.

In 2001 Boston police officers received a tip that a Kmart employee was engaging in suspicious activity involving repeated short trips in a blue sedan. Officers set up surveillance in the parking lot, observed the described sequence of events, detained the employee upon his return, and discovered four clear plastic bags containing a substance resembling cocaine. The officers then arrested the two men in the car, one of whom was petitioner Luis Melendez-Diaz. The officers placed all three suspects in a police cruiser. During the short drive to the police station the officers observed their passengers fidgeting and making furtive movements in the back of the car. After depositing the men at the station they searched the police cruiser and found a plastic bag containing nineteen smaller bags hidden in the partition between the front and back seats. The officers submitted the seized substances to the State Laboratory Institute of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which was required by law to conduct chemical analysis upon police request. Analysts at the laboratory performed the tests on November 28, 2001, and prepared three certificates of analysis that reported the weight of the bags and stated that the substance was found to contain cocaine. Each certificate was sworn before a notary public by the analysts, as required under Massachusetts law, and reprinted the statutory provision making the certificates prima facie evidence of the composition, quality, and net weight of the narcotic analyzed. Melendez-Diaz was charged with distributing cocaine and trafficking in cocaine in an amount between 14 and 28 grams. At trial the prosecution introduced the bags seized from the codefendant and from the cruiser along with the three certificates. Petitioner objected to admission of the certificates, asserting that Crawford v. Washington required the analysts to testify in person. The trial court overruled the objection and admitted the certificates pursuant to the state statute. The jury found Melendez-Diaz guilty. He appealed, contending that admission of the certificates violated his Sixth Amendment right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. The Appeals Court of Massachusetts affirmed the convictions, relying on a prior decision of the Supreme Judicial Court that had held forensic analysts are not subject to confrontation. The Supreme Judicial Court denied review, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.