The State v. Kline
| Decision Date | 21 June 1880 |
| Citation | 6 N.W. 184,54 Iowa 183 |
| Parties | THE STATE v. KLINE |
| Court | Iowa Supreme Court |
Appeal from Jones District Court.
THE defendant was indicted for an assault with intent to murder one Anna Rickel. Upon a trial he was convicted of the crime charged in the indictment, and he appeals.
AFFIRMED.
I. M Preston & Son, and A. J. Munroe, for appellant.
J. F McJunkin, Attorney General, for the State.
I.
It appears from the evidence that Anna Rickel, who was a single woman, was living at the house of one Haskins. She slept in a room upon the ground floor. There was a window near the bed in which she slept. On the night of the 19th of April, 1878, at about eleven o'clock, some one raised the window and discharged a shot-gun loaded with shot toward the bed. She was wounded upon the arm and on the right side of the head. The gun was so heavily loaded, and the discharge was at such short range, that the shot passed through the head-board of the bedstead, making a hole two or three inches in diameter, and through the side of the house, and into a fence some twenty-seven paces from the house. That the person who discharged the gun is guilty of the crime charged in the indictment is not denied, nor could such denial well be made under this state of facts. The evidence against the defendant was wholly circumstantial, and consisted mainly in the finding of a shot-gun about six or seven feet from the house on the morning after the shooting, which gun was claimed to be owned by the defendant, and in his possession up to the time the crime was committed. It was also sought to connect the defendant with the crime by means of the alleged identity of certain foot tracks found near the house, and going from and toward it, with tracks made by boots worn by defendant.
Anna Rickel testified that at the time she received the injury she had been seduced by the defendant under promise of marriage, and that she was then pregnant with an illegitimate child, of which the defendant was the father; and that defendant procured medicine for her, to produce an abortion, and solicited her to take it; that the last time he visited her was about two weeks before she was shot, and that he then said that was the last time he would visit her. The defendant objected to all this evidence as incompetent and inadmissible, and now insists that the objection should have been sustained because it was not competent for the State to prove another distinct and different indictable offense, and because the evidence tended to impeach the character of the defendant by proving criminal conduct other than that charged in the indictment. It is a general rule that evidence of a distinct substantive offense cannot be admitted in proof of another offense. But this rule is subject to the exception that whatever serves to establish the scienter or quo animo, or a motive for the commission of the crime charged, may be shown. See State v. Walters, 45 Iowa 389. Where a husband was on trial for the poisoning of his wife, and the State introduced evidence tending to show criminal intimacy between the defendant and another woman prior to the death of the wife, it was held such evidence was proper as tending to show that "the affections of the husband were alienated from the wife, and that he would therefore be more likely to desire her death." State v. Hinkle, 6 Iowa 380. In the case at bar the fact that Anna Rickel was pregnant, and that the defendant was the father of her unborn child, would tend to show a motive for desiring her death, that the shame and scandal of the birth of an illegitimate child might not attach to him.
II. The defendant excepted to the ninth instruction given by the court to the jury. As the ninth and tenth instructions, although separately numbered, are really upon the same subject, they should be considered together. They are as follows:
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