44 S.C. 338 | S.C. | 1895
The opinion of the court was delivered by
The appellant was convicted of manslaughter by the jury at a trial had in the Court of General Sessions for Abbeville County, in this State, at the October, 1894, term thereof, and after his honor, Judge Watts, had sentenced him to punishment by confinement in the State Penitentiary for seven years, he appealed therefrom to this court. We will now dispose of the five grounds of appeal.
The testimony all tended to establish the fact that Allen Chiles did administer to his wife, on the 13th day of July, 1894, a whipping, using sycamore switches, from which she was bruised from head to foot, in some cases cutting through the skin, and in other cases merely bruising the skin, and that this whipping caused the poor woman such intense suffering, that the creature, called a man and her husband, himself went for a physician, who prescribed calomel and administered an anodyne, and on the Wednesday afterwards pneumonia ensued. Do the allegations in the indictment answer the demands of the law when a man is arraigned for crime? The late Chief Justice O’Neall, in the case of State v. Schroder, 3 Hill, 65, laid down the rule for testing the sufficiency of an indictment thus: “The general rule in framing an indictment is, that the offence should be so described that the defendant may know how to answer it, the court what judgment to pronounce, aud that a conviction or acquittal on it may be pleaded in bar to any subsequent or other indictment for the same offence.” This' court, in the case of State v. Shirer, 20 S. C., 408, recognized the rule laid down in State v. Schroder, supra, as “a guide.” But the General Assembly of this State, in 1887, by the 5th section of an act entitled “An act to regulate criminal practice in the Courts of General Sessions in this State” (19 Stat., 830), provided: “That every indictment for murder shall be deemed and adjudged sufficient aud good in law, which, in addition to setting forth the time and place, together with a plain statement, divested of all useless phraseology, of the manner in which the death of the deceased was caused, charges that the defendant did feloneously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought, kill and murder the deceased.” It seems to us that the indictment here preferred answers all of these requirements, and that it
In order that a physician may correctly diagnose a case to which he is called, it is almost a necessity that he should learn the previous state of health of the patient. Dr. Brennan testifies that to his inquiries in this direction, he was informed that before she was beaten, the wife was able to go about and attend to her usual duties, but that on the Sunday he saw the patient
It is the judgment of this court, that the judgment of the Circuit Court be affirmed.
Appellant’s counsel, in their argument on appeal, alleged that there was error in this charge because, “as the indictment charged that the death was caused by one mortal wound, he [the judge] should have confined the jury to a consideration of that question, and that alone.” And, further, because “there was no evidence that the deceased’s death was hastened by the defendant, and there is no allegation in the indictment that her death was accelerated by the defendant.”