Donald Brooks v. James H. Rose, Warden

I respectfully dissent. The question presented by this appeal is whether a jury may arbitrarily disregard overwhelming and uneontradicted expert opinion evidence that a defendant was insane when he committed the act for which he was tried, and find him sane beyond a reasonable doubt solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony of his behavior that afforded no direct evidence of his mental state and permitted only speculative inferences about it. I would hold that this conviction is without evidentiary support of a critical element of the offense charged and that it therefore offends the due…