68 Miss. 233 | Miss. | 1890
delivered the opinion of the court.
The appellant has been convicted of the murder of James Fos-sett, and sentenced to capital punishment. The defense principally relied on in the court below was that, at the time of the homicide, appellant was insane by reason of an attack of mania a pota, resulting from prolonged and excessive use of intoxicating liquor. Many errors are assigned, but we note only such as may be of probable importance in the further prosecution of the indictment.
On the trial of the cause, Dr. R. A. Quin was introduced as a witness by the defendant to prove the character of the defendant for peace or violence, and also as an expert to prove the symptoms and characteristics of mania a potu. On cross-examination by the district-attorney, and over the objections of the defendant, the district-attorney was permitted to ask the witness the following question : “ Do you know whether or not he [the defendant] has ever killed a man before ?” And over like objection the witness was permitted to answer: “ I have heard that he had.” The defendant
The next error assigned rests upon these facts : Dr. J. H. Pur-nell was examined as an expert, and the defendant, for the purpose of establishing his defense of insanity, put to him an hypothetical question, the hypothesis consisting of facts which the evidence of certain witnesses tended to prove. This witness answered that, assuming the supposed facts to be true, the defendant was at the time of the killing suffering from mania a potu to such an extent that he could not distinguish between right and wrong. On cross-examination, the state’s attorney put to the witness this question: “ Immediately after he had shot a man, assuming it to be true that a man had shot another in a bar-room, and immediately afterwards
The tenth, thirteenth, and sixteenth instructions for the state are erroneous. By the tenth instruction the jury was told that if it had no reasonable doubt of the sanity of the accused at the time of the killing, “ then, if the jury believe the defendant shot and killed the deceased, they will find him guilty of murder.” In effect, the instruction was that if the defendant was capable of malice, the jury must convict upon proof only of the killing. The court practically settled, by its instruction, the existence of the material ingredient of murder- — -the malice aforethought of the accused.
The thirteenth instruction is clearly upon the weight of evidence, and therefore should have been refused. By it the jury was told that “ a jury is not warranted in inferring that a man is insane from the mere fact of his committing a crime (if the jury believe such was committed by him), or from the enormity of such crime, or from a mere apparent absence of adequate motive that may or may not appear for it, for the law presumes from a killing with a deadly weapon a bad motive, and that it is prompted by malice, if
By the sixteenth instruction for the state the court informed the jury that, in law, the defendant was responsible for his act if the jury believed that, at the time of the killing, “ the mind of the defendant was capable of knowing that if he shot the deceased, not in his own self-defense, he was committing an offense against the law of the land, and it will not matter what the jury believe was the moral conception of the defendant of the act at the time.” "VYe suppose it was intended by this instruction to adopt to its full extent the doctrine of McNaghten’s Case, 10 Clark & F. 200, that one who acts from an insane delusion is criminally responsible if the imaginary facts would not, if real, excuse or justify the act. This standard, accepted by this instruction of sanity, or rather of responsibility of the insane for acts committed by them, excludes the test of capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and imposes upon the insane the exact responsibility that rests upon the sane, with the single exception that the facts imagined by the insane to exist are for the purposes of his trial to be treated as real.
Reversed and remanded.