## Facts

- Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and camped overnight.
- While the women were engaging in consensual sexual activity, Brenner was shot in the arm; after a pause, additional shots were fired, striking Brenner multiple times in the face, neck, and head.
- Wight ran for cover and was shot in the head and back; she died before help arrived.
- Brenner escaped and obtained help.
- Stephen Roy Carr, who had been living in the woods, became a suspect, was arrested on a Florida fugitive warrant, and made incriminating statements.
- After a non-jury trial, Carr was convicted of first-degree murder and related offenses and sentenced to life imprisonment.
- Carr sought mitigation to voluntary manslaughter, asserting he acted in the heat of passion after observing the victims’ sexual activity, and offered evidence of his “psychosexual history” to support that claim.

## Issues

1. Whether evidence of Carr’s psychosexual history was relevant and admissible to support a heat-of-passion theory and mitigate first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter based on alleged provocation from observing the victims’ consensual same-sex intimacy.

## Decision

- The Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the judgment of sentence for first-degree murder.
- The court held that the trial court properly excluded the proffered psychosexual-history evidence as irrelevant to the legal test for voluntary manslaughter.
- The court concluded that the victims’ conduct, as described, was not “serious provocation” sufficient to satisfy Pennsylvania’s objective standard for heat-of-passion mitigation.

## Legal Principles

- Voluntary manslaughter (heat of passion) requires a “sudden and intense passion” resulting from “serious provocation,” and the provocation is assessed under an objective reasonable-person standard.
- The factfinder applies a two-step inquiry: (1) whether there was legally adequate provocation; and (2) whether there was sufficient cooling time.
- Evidence aimed at the defendant’s unusual sensitivities or personal background is not admissible to convert legally inadequate provocation into “serious provocation” under the objective test.
- Psychological evidence may be relevant to defenses turning on individual mental condition (e.g., insanity or diminished capacity), but not to heat-of-passion mitigation when the governing standard is objective.

## Conclusion

The court affirmed Carr’s life sentence for first-degree murder, ruling that consensual same-sex intimacy did not constitute legally adequate provocation and that Carr’s psychosexual history was irrelevant to Pennsylvania’s objective heat-of-passion standard for voluntary manslaughter.


Commonwealth v. Carr, 398 Pa. Super. 306, 580 A.2d 1362 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1990)