The People, Plaintiff and Respondent v. Charles Elmore, Defendant and Appellant — Kennard, J., Concurring

Summary

Justice Kennard, concurring and dissenting, would treat an honest but unreasonable belief in the need for self-defense as negating malice even when the belief results entirely from a mental disorder, making the killing voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. She agrees that the trial court properly refused to instruct the jury on imperfect self-defense because the evidence did not substantially support that theory, but she rejects the majority's legal rationale. Her writing also argues that the majority's approach conflicts with the statutory treatment of mental-disease evidence and fails to confine sanity questions to the sanity phase.