227 Pa. 86 | Pa. | 1909
Opinion by
February 14, 1910:
The appellant, George A. Greene, was charged in the court below with the murder of Edith Wonderly. From the case as presented by the commonwealth it appeared that about midnight on December 24, 1907, a man and woman were heard quarreling on the sidewalk at the corner of Carlisle and Brown streets, in the city of Philadelphia; that pistol shots were heard; that a man was seen pointing a revolver and shooting at an object under the awning at a store on the comer of the streets named; that he then walked up the street a short distance and, pointing the revolver at his own head, shot himself. The woman found upon the pavement under the awning was
No evidence was offered on behalf of the prisoner, and the only questions for the jury’s determination were whether the commonwealth had shown that he had shot the deceased, and, if so, whether his offense was willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. There could have been no doubt in the minds of the jury that he had slain the woman, and that his crime was a premeditated one appeared from a statement made by him, from his purchase of a revolver and cartridges shortly before the shooting and from letters written by him to the mother of the deceased and to other persons before the crime was committed. Though the verdict was fully warranted by the evidence, it cannot be sustained here if the trial judge committed substantial error in his instructions to the jury as to the law which was to be their guide. When a man’s life is at stake it is not to be adjudged forfeited by the law except under strict observance by court and jury of the right of the accused, however revolting his offense may appear to be, to be tried in accordance with long-settled and well-known principles. It is difficult to understand the failure of a trial court to follow these in a capital case. Such failure is almost certain to result in the delay of justice, often and not unnaturally misunderstood as a denial of it to the commonwealth, when a retrial must be ordered, that the accused may be tried according to the law of the land.
'Twenty-seven assignments of error are before us. All have been given the careful consideration required by the gravity of the case. The first twenty-six are dismissed with the simple comment that by no one of them has error been pointed out, and but for the twenty-seventh the judgment would be affirmed. The subject of that assignment is the following portion of the charge: “The law holds that if a man uses a deadly . weapon upon the vital part of another person, it is a presumption that he intended the consequences that would follow
In the present case it was the statutory duty of the jury, upon finding that the prisoner was guilty of felonious homicide, to fix the degree of his guilt. Indeed, it may be fairly said that, under the evidence, the real question for their determination was the degree. The law presumed that it rose no higher than the second, but by the court’s instruction, complained of in the twenty-seventh assignment, the jury were unmistakably told that the law’s presumption was that he was guilty of murder of the first degree and that it was for him to answer aught that he might have to say to relieve himself from that presumption. He answered naught and w'as not called upon to say anything to rebut such a presumption, for it did not arise from the mere killing of his victim, even though he killed her with a deadly weapon directed at a vital part of her body.
The twenty-seventh assignment of error is sustained and the judgment is reversed with a venire facias de novo.