DeRusse v. State

579 S.W.2d 224, 1979 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 1388
CourtCourt of Criminal Appeals of Texas
DecidedApril 11, 1979
Docket56070
StatusPublished
Cited by155 cases

This text of 579 S.W.2d 224 (DeRusse v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
DeRusse v. State, 579 S.W.2d 224, 1979 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 1388 (Tex. 1979).

Opinion

OPINION

DALLY, Judge.

This is an appeal from a conviction for murder. The punishment is imprisonment for twenty-six years.

Appellant contends that: (1) a psychiatrist was erroneously permitted to testify to statements made by appellant during a competency examination; (2) the prosecutor improperly referred to the order of the trial court finding that appellant’s confession was voluntary; (3) testimony concerning an unrelated crime was erroneously introduced; (4) the prosecutor offered in evidence photographs which had previously been ruled inadmissible; (5) evidence as to appellant’s lack of a prior criminal record was erroneously excluded; (6) the trial court erroneously refused appellant’s requested charges on assault and on the presumption of innocence; (7) the trial court erroneously charged the jury on the offense of injury to a child; (8) the prosecutor engaged in improper jury argument; (9) the district attorney should have been required to honor a pretrial plea bargain agreement; and (10) the State should not have been allowed to have two attorneys present its case.

The evidence establishes that appellant and his wife fatally beat their three-year-old son with their hands, a board, a belt, and an electric cord. 1 The child was pronounced dead- on arrival at the Robstown Riverside Hospital on October 4,1975. Two of the nurses on duty in the emergency room at the time testified that the child appeared to have been run over by a car.

The Nueces County Medical Examiner testified that:

“ . . . the child was severely beaten. I estimated that about seventy-five percent of the body surface was covered with contusions and bruises and that the bruising was from the top of the head to the tops of the feet. There was literally no area spared of the bruising . . . ”

Asked the cause of death, the Medical Examiner testified:

“. . . the underlying cause of death was extensive contusions and ecchymoses of the body.
“Q. In layman’s terms, what does that mean?
“A. He was beaten to death.”

Appellant’s defense was that he was insane at the time of the offense. Dr. Henry *228 Hammer, a clinical psychologist, testified that he had examined appellant in October, 1975. He described his conclusions, based upon this examination, as follows:

“I saw Mr. deRusse as suffering from a paranoid state which is transitory, psychotic episode of indeterminate length. This means that for a specific part of his life, Mr. deRusse was out of contact with reality. The greater portion of his life he was in contact with reality and continues to be in contact with reality. That is, he would be perceived by most reasonable people to be okay, to not be crazy. However, when you get into that segment of his life that encapsulates a delusional belief system, his perception of the situation and yours might be very radically different. His area of interest, which was delusional, happened to be in the sphere of religion. He believed — and I haven’t spoken with him since — October, ’75, so I can’t say what his belief system might still be, but at that time he believed very deeply in possession by demons. This gets into a religious area that is tricky to deal with because a significant portion of the population, maybe small in terms of percentage but large in terms of numbers, also believed in possession by spirits. Where it gets to be important to distinguish is his particular elaboration of those beliefs, how they were in his mind. He had a very concrete belief that his son was possessed by a spirit, by a demon, that his son was acting not on his own but at the behest of a spirit, a demon.
“Now, insofar as you and I would not agree that that is in fact what has been happening, he was out of contact with reality. Now that is very superficially what went on. What we are dealing with here is a whole complex personality on which superimposed is this basic disorder. This disorder which is of indetermi-nant length but of serious proportion

Dr. Hammer testified that appellant did not intend to harm his son when he beat him:

. He was busy attacking the behavior of a demon, in his own mind, he was. As extra baggage to that,' as something that happened inadvertently, he— undésirably, perhaps, undesirably is a better term, he was also causing physical harm to his son. He saw that as very undesirable. He did not want to cause harm to the son. He did want to correct this demonic behavior he perceived.”

Dr. Hammer testified that, in his opinion, appellant’s delusional belief that his son was possessed by a demon was a mental disease or defect and appellant, as a result, did not know that his conduct was wrong or was incapable of conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law. V.T.C.A. Penal Code, Sec. 8.01.

In rebuttal, the State called Dr. Joel Kut-nick, a psychiatrist who had been appointed by the trial court to examine appellant as to his competence to stand trial and his sanity at the time of the offense. Art. 46.02, Sec. 3, and Art. 46.03, Sec. 3, V.A.C.C.P. Dr. Kutnick testified that appellant had not beaten his son to get rid of a demon, but as means of discipline:

“. . . [A]s I see the case, the religious issue, in one way, is kind of a red herring because Mr. deRusse himself doesn’t feel or doesn’t in any way say that the reason he was disciplining his child was because he was trying to get rid of the demon. He was- doing it as a way of trying to teach his boy the correct way of behaving and in his own mind felt that he was doing the right kind of thing in terms of bringing up his son. The religious issue is kind of, wasn’t the kind of thing that motivated him to act in terms of delivering punishment to his son at all.”

Moreover, Dr. Kutnick did not believe that appellant’s religious beliefs constituted a mental disease or defect. He expressed his disagreement with Dr Hammer as follows:

“Dr. Hammer feels . . . that because his religious beliefs are such that a majority of the population don’t have the strong conviction or as a bizarre kinds of things, like demon possession and seeing smoke arise from the boy’s body, at one *229 time, that this represents a psychosis, a mental illness, a paranoid state. I don’t see this as a mental illness. I think one has to be very careful when one gets into the area of religion and calling people mentally ill. Many, many people have all kinds of religious beliefs . . . They are not sick in the psychiatric sense, they are only caught up in their own cultural beliefs. I feel that the way Mr.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
579 S.W.2d 224, 1979 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 1388, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/derusse-v-state-texcrimapp-1979.