74 Pa. Super. 463 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1920
Opinion by
The defendants were indicted for and convicted of an attempt to commit arson. The defense advanced embraced two separate branches, to wit: 1. The evidencé as a whole discloses nothing more at the most than a naked isolated intent to burn and was not sufficient to support a conviction of an attempt to burn. 2. The evidence as a whole was insufficient to support the conclusion that the defendants or either of them could be identified as the guilty party or parties.
1. The opinion filed by the learned court below, which will be printed with the record of the case, points out, in a manner satisfactory to us, the reasons why the evidence in this record fully measures up to recognized standards as to its sufficiency to support the conclusion that the intent which was so manifest had ripened into an actual attempt to burn the property. The authorities are collated and carefully reviewed and leave nothing of value for this court to add on that phase of the case.
2. The same opinion fully and carefully reviews the evidence on the part of the Commonwealth and summarizes its salient points as briefly as we could hope to do'.
Human judgments of course are not infallible, but if human experience and human reason may still be relied on to guide us to conclusions based upon evidence, we must find ourselves, as the learned judge below found himself, unable to say that the evidence left nothing for consideration by the jury and that the defendants were entitled, under the law, to an order discharging them without day.
We have carefully studied the entire record including all of the evidence and we have reached the conclusion that the case was tried in a manner as favorable to the defendants as they had any right to expect and that questions of evidence were ruled upon almost uniformly to their advantage when the Commonwealth might have
The judgment is affirmed and the record remitted to the court below and it is ordered that the defendant appear in that court at such time as he may be there called and that he be by that court committed until he has complied with the sentence or any part of it which had not been performed at the time the appeal in this case was made a supersedeas.