You asked (1) for the past five years, how often criminal defendants have claimed intoxication as a defense to a particular crime and (2) the origins of the defense.

General Statutes § 53a-7 provides that intoxication is not a defense to a criminal charge but that a defendant may offer evidence of intoxication to negate an element of the crime charged. Its use is limited to specific-intent crimes, rather than those where the mental state is recklessness or negligence (State v. Shine, 193 Conn. 632 (1984)).

We found no state or federal agency that keeps track of how often criminal defendants argue that they were too intoxicated to form the specific intent to commit the offense with which they were charged. And while we were unable to gauge how often public defenders raise intoxication, Douglas Nash, head of their appellate unit, reports anecdotally that each year his unit sees about 10-20 appeals involving such claims. He points out, however, that it would not "see" cases where intoxication was an issue at an earlier point in the prosecution - for example, when a prosecutor decides not to charge a defendant with a specific-intent crime based on evidence of intoxication or when a defendant accepts a plea agreement rather than stand trial.

Under Connecticut's early common (judge-made) law, voluntary intoxication was not an excuse or justification for any crime. But over the course of the 19^th Century, courts in Connecticut and most other states began to allow defendants to present evidence of intoxication when it was relevant to their ability to possess the mental state needed to commit the crime charged.

Commentators suggest that the allowance of this defense was based on the rise of a scientific school of thought that attributed criminal behavior to biological and environmental factors. Sympathy for intoxicated offenders may have increased further when the American Medical Association recognized alcoholism as a disease in 1956. That action provided support for the theory that voluntary intoxication was more like a mental illness than criminal behavior. (Ingle, Law on the Rocks: the Intoxication Defenses are Being Eighty-Sixed, 55 Vand. L. Rev. 607 (2002)).

The current version of Connecticut's intoxication statute was enacted in 1969 as part of the legislature's comprehensive revision of the criminal statutes. As of March 2002, 34 other states permit defendants to offer proof of voluntary intoxication to establish reasonable doubt on the issue of intent. However, 15 states (Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas) bar its introduction for this purpose. A plurality of U. S. Supreme Court justices ruled in 1996 that Montana's law on this subject does not violate the Due Process Clause of the Constitution's 14^th Amendment (Montana v. Egelhof, 518 U. S. 37).

SP-L: eh