Introduction

Extreme Emotional Disturbance Under the MPC

Introduction

Criminal law has always had to deal with the person who kills on purpose while in the grip of overwhelming emotion. Under the Model Penal Code, a homicide committed purposely or knowingly is murder¹, and that classification applies equally to the killer who planned the death for weeks and the killer who acted in a sudden surge of rage or grief. Many legal systems nonetheless treat the second killer as less blameworthy, because the loss of self-control has a human explanation that cold calculation lacks. The common-law provocation doctrine, also called the heat of passion defense, gave effect to that intuition by reducing an intentional killing from murder to voluntary manslaughter, and it is often described as a concession to human weakness.² The Code keeps the idea of mitigation but names its trigger extreme mental or emotional disturbance where older law spoke of heat of passion.³ The reasons for that change in vocabulary are taken up in their own section below.

Model Penal Code § 210.3(1)(b) is the Code's answer to the puzzle. It makes manslaughter of a homicide "which would otherwise be murder" when the killing is committed "under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there is reasonable explanation or excuse."⁴ The provision is one of two ways into manslaughter, since subsection (1) opens by saying that criminal homicide constitutes manslaughter "when" either of its two paragraphs is satisfied.⁵ The murder section points to this provision as well, because § 210.2(1) begins with the words "Except as provided in Section 210.3(1)(b)."⁶ That carve-out matters for grading: a killing that satisfies the purposeful-or-knowing definition of murder is a first-degree felony, while one that qualifies under (1)(b) is manslaughter, a felony of the second degree.⁷

The phrase "would otherwise be murder" makes the disturbance inquiry a second decision, reached only after murder has been established. The provision does not ask whether the actor intended to kill. It presupposes that the killing meets the definition of murder and then asks whether the circumstances of the actor's emotional state justify reducing the offense. The statute also supplies the yardstick for the second decision: the reasonableness of the explanation or excuse is judged from the viewpoint of a person in the actor's situation under the circumstances as he believes them to be.⁸ So the factfinder looks at the events from where the defendant stood, with the facts as the defendant perceived them, and does not rely on the detached judgment of a bystander who knows everything the defendant did not. This chapter develops that standard in stages, and it starts by placing (1)(b) within the structure of Model Penal Code § 210.3⁹, next to the reckless-manslaughter route in (1)(a), because seeing what the other route requires shows what the disturbance route adds.