Defendant Asserts Expert Testimony Regarding Fight or Flight Response Should Have Been Admitted at Trial
Recent Cases in Law and Neuroscience, Curated by the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior and the Shen Neurolaw Lab with support from the Dana Foundation
On December 10, 2020, in an unpublished opinion, a California Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of Deshun Kittles, who had contended that expert testimony regarding the fear response should have been admitted at his trial.
In 2017, Kittles shot a man several times during a confrontation. At trial, Kittles testified that “I didn’t aim to kill this person…. I shot out of fear for my life.” The state argued that Kittles did intend to kill the victim that day, but the jury found that “the attempted murder was not willful, deliberate, or premeditated.” Kittles was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 26 years imprisonment. He was 33 at the time of the sentencing.
Kittles contended that the trial court erred by excluding evidence of a “violent character” at the scene who provoked the shooting and by excluding expert testimony from a psychologist on the fight or flight reaction.
Kittles asserted that he was threatened by a second man, not the victim, at the scene of the crime, and that it “was mere happenstance defendant’s shot struck the victim” rather than this other violent man. The court found that “we have considerable difficulty seeing the reasonable bounds of such theory, nor were we aided in that regard by defendant at oral argument.”
Kittles also claimed that expert testimony on the fight or flight response “was relevant both to bolster his claim of self-defense by explaining the reasonableness of his actions and to demonstrate the response caused his failure to recall specifics about the incident on cross-examination.” Kittles had filed a motion at trial to allow the testimony of a psychologist to explain the fear response and its “neurobiological underpinnings and its impact on memory and rational thought process.” The trial court did not permit the testimony, saying, “the jury is going to have to decide, not some doctor who never examined [defendant].”
The appeals court found that the trial court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the expert testimony, stating that it would have “trenched on the province of the jury” to decide Kittles’ credibility.
Because of this, the appeals court affirmed the judgement of the trial court. The case was remanded for the trial court to exercise its discretion on whether to strike the five-year term in prison for a serious felony conviction, an option which had not been available at the time of sentencing.
Key words: fight or flight, fear response, expert testimony, California
Citation: People v. Kittles, 2020 WL 7252998
This post is the 38th post as part of an ongoing Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) series tracking the latest developments in law and neuroscience cases. To see previous posts about recent cases, see the full case archive on the CLBB website. To see updates on legal scholarship, see the Neurolaw News, hosted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. This project is made possible through support of the Dana Foundation.
