43 S.C. 132 | S.C. | 1895
The opinion of the court was delivered by
Under an indictment for the murder of J. H. Rickies, jr., the defendant was tried and convicted of manslaughter, and from thejudgment rendered appeals upon numerous exceptions. The circumstances immediately attending the. homicide may be thus briefly stated: On the evening when the deceased was shot, he had sent by a servant a bill against the prisoner for collection, which was returned unpaid, with an exceedingly offensive and dirty message from the prisoner to the deceased. When the message was delivered, the deceased said: “All right, then I will see him in the morning or to-night.” Shortly afterwards the prisoner left his house, and while walking on the sidewalk on his side of the street, he was approached by the deceased, coming from his place on the other side of the street, and when he got within about fourteen feet of the prisoner, the deceased was shot by the prisoner, inflicting the fatal wound from which death ensued in a very few days. None of the other witnesses heard any words pass between the parties, but the prisoner, in his testimony, said: “The first and only words I heard were, ‘What in, the hell’” — and before the sentence was concluded, the pistol was fired. The prisoner also testified that the deceased when he approached him “was walking tolerably rapidly, with his hand in this position (indicates with hand at right hip pocket).”
The exceptions are twenty in number, but as the first, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth were very properly abandoned at the hearing, they need not be further noticed. The remaining exceptions may be divided into two general classes: first, those which impute error to the Circuit Judge in his rulings as to the admissibility of testimony; second, those imputing errors of omission and commission in his charge to the jury.
It seems to us that there was no error on the part of the Circuit Judge in refusing to strike out those words, for they are
The case of State v. Talbert, 41 S. C., 526, cited by counsel for appellant, is not in conflict with this view; for there no motion to strike out was made, and the court was not called upon to decide, and did not decide, any thing upon the subject. It was simply stated that in that case no objection to the dying declaration, on account of its contents, was made when it was offered, and that “there was no motion to suppress or strike out” that portion of the declaration which referred to a difficulty which had occurred between the parties about six months previous to the homicide. But in this case no such question is presented, and is not to-be regarded as decided; for the only question here is whether the Circuit Judge erred in refusing to strike out of the dying declaration all those words which defendant’s counsel moved to 'strike out. The fifteenth exception must be overruled.
The fourth exception imputes error in the refusal of defendant’s eighth request to charge. That request is also amenable to the same objection. In addition to this, the jury were instructed, though not in the language of the request, which could not properly be adopted, that a person accused of crime had a right to offer evidence of his good character, which, with all the other facts in the case, the jury were required to take into consideration in determining whether the guilt of the accused had been established beyond a reasonable doubt. What more could properly have been required, we are at a loss to conceive.
After having thus gone over the exceptions, we again carefully examined the charge of the Circuit Judge as a whole, and we must say that we think the law applicable to the case was fully, fairly, and correctly laid down to the jury, and hence none of the exceptions to the charge can be sustained.
The judgment of this court is, that the judgment of the Circuit Court be affirmed.