People v. Elliott

336 N.E.2d 146, 32 Ill. App. 3d 654, 1975 Ill. App. LEXIS 3029
CourtAppellate Court of Illinois
DecidedOctober 1, 1975
Docket74-383
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 336 N.E.2d 146 (People v. Elliott) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Appellate Court of Illinois primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
People v. Elliott, 336 N.E.2d 146, 32 Ill. App. 3d 654, 1975 Ill. App. LEXIS 3029 (Ill. Ct. App. 1975).

Opinion

Mr. JUSTICE KARNS

delivered the opinion of the court:

Defendant-appellant Harold Elliott was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and deviate sexual assault after a jury trial in Madison County and was sentenced to serve concurrent terms of from 10 to 20 years’ imprisonment. On appeal, he contends that he was not proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in that a reasonable doubt existed as to his sanity, that convictions and sentences for two offenses arising from a single course of conduct were improper, and that the sentences are excessive.

Because the defendant does not contest the facts of the incident upon which the prosecution was based, we need not discuss the facts in detail. Suffice it to say that the incident involved the abduction and assault by the defendant of an eight-year-old girl. Other facts will be supplied where necessary.

At trial, defendant’s only defense was that of insanity. Section 6 — 2 of the Criminal Code of 1961 (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1973, ch. 38, par. 6 — 2) states:

“(a) A person is not criminally responsible for conduct if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or mental defect, he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.
(b) The terms “mental disease or mental defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise anti-social conduct.”

The issue was further narrowed by defendant’s concession that he understood the criminality of his conduct. Thus, at issue was solely the question whether defendant was capable of conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law. The defense case consisted primarily of the testimony of the defendant and two psychiatrists. While serving as a minister, defendant had a brief extramarital affair with a parishioner. Shortly thereafter, he began to expose himself to women and eventually began to molest young girls, offenses for which he was convicted in New York. This conduct was remarkably similar to the instant offense. Defendant served part of a penitentiary sentence and was sent to a State hospital where he remained for four years. Upon his discharge he was allowed to leave New York and come to Illinois where during the remainder of his probationary period he was treated by Dr. Warren Hempel, one of the psychiatrists who testified at the trial. The instant offense occurred about two years after he stopped seeing Dr. Hempel and was apparently the first such conduct since defendant was convicted and confined in New York in 1967. He testified that the night before the offense he was agitated and upset because of an argument with his wife. The next morning he attempted to perform odd jobs around the house but became more and more upset. He left the home, driving his truck across the lawn because his wife had parked her car behind his truck in the driveway to keep him fom leaving, and drove to a shopping center parking lot to sit and think. He testified that he was very depressed and wanted to “die” or “disappear.” At this point, defendant stated that he began to feel a “roaring” in his head and a tingling sensation in his body. According to defendant, it was the same sensation he had felt prior to the commission of his prior offenses. He drove to a drug store and bought two magazines with pictures depicting naked women, then drove to a residential neighborhood where he encountered two young girls. He showed the girls the pictures and asked if they could help defendant locate the women. One girl fled, but the other, the complainant, entered defendant’s truck. They drove around the area for a while, then turned into a side road leading away from the residential area, where defendant parked the truck. Defendant testified that although his head was “full of noises, a voice screaming inside of me stop,” he “calmly” proceeded. During the assault he noticed a vehicle behind him. He had the girl dress and drove further down the road and eventually pulled off and stopped. He released the girl when two men approached the car, then began to cry and beat his head against the steering wheel. He sat that way until the State Police arrived. Notable about defendant’s testimony is the almost total recall of his movements, including such things as the routes he took, his intricate maneuvering to park next to the girls on the street, and the words spoken by him and the complaining witness. But he did not testify about using threats to get the girl in the car or forcing her to sit on the floor to avoid being seen or threats employed to force the girl to commit the act. All of these matters were established by the complaining witness and all circumstances but the commission of the act itself were corroborated by others. Furthermore, defendant’s testimony was that the girl refused to perform the act and that the assault was therefore not completed. While there is no doubt that the evidence was sufficient to convict, these material discrepancies in the testimony may have influenced the jury in its determination of defendant’s mental state.

Dr. Warren Hempel was the first psychiatrist to testify. He had treated defendant for several months during 1971 and early 1972 and saw him again after the instant offense had occurred. Besides his own examination of the defendant, he had read and was apparently familiar with the history of defendant’s treatment in New York. Hempel stated that, in his opinion, considering defendant’s education and ability to distinguish right from wrong, the commission of the offense exhibited “totally irrational behavior.” Further, it was his opinion that defendant was “unable to control his behavior” at the time, that defendant’s behavior was “crazy” and that defendant was “psychotic.” Dr. Hempel was reluctant to specify defendant’s exact mental illness but described defendant as “schizophrenic” and “immature.” He later stated that defendant was still in need of psychiatric treatment, that defendant suffered from a “personality disorder,” described by Hempel as being “about a half dozen things listed in the book,” “immature personality,” “symptoms of schizogonic personality,” and “passive aggressive personality.” On cross-examination, Hempel admitted that several schools of thought existed in psychiatry and that different opinions and terms might apply to individual patients.

Dr. Nathan Blackman had examined defendant three times subsequent to the offense. He also took a personal history from defendant and reviewed the New York findings. He described defendant’s relation of fantasies and the increasing “momentum” of the decision to molest a child, culminating in the deafening roar and resulting in a “preoccupation which he couldn’t stop or which he couldn’t control in any way.” Black-man stated that defendant suffered from a “severe obsessive compulsive neurosis,” “with evidence of depression, with evidence of paranoid thinking which at the time the event happened made it impossible for him to change the course of his behavior” and that defendant was “unable to resist tire pursuit of his obsessive thinking.” Blackman stated that defendant still suffered from mental illness and required psychiatric treatment but that defendant was not a psychopath, which he defined as one repeatedly in conflict with the law. He described defendant’s acts as a “ritual” during which defendant expected and sought to be punished.

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Bluebook (online)
336 N.E.2d 146, 32 Ill. App. 3d 654, 1975 Ill. App. LEXIS 3029, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-elliott-illappct-1975.