Bines v. State

• Decision Date: 11 August 1903
• Parties: BINES v. STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

45 S.E. 376

118 Ga. 320

BINES v. STATE.

Supreme Court of Georgia

August 11, 1903

Syllabus by the Court.

1. Before a person charged with a particular crime can be lawfully found guilty thereof, it is necessary to establish the corpus delicti. This cannot be done by the mere extrajudicial confession of the accused. There must be aliunde proof of the corpus delicti.

2. In a criminal trial, evidence that the accused, while confined in prison, upon being interrogated as to his conduct upon a certain occasion, stated that he had intended to attempt to overpower the jailer and effect his escape, is admissible as a circumstance against him.

Error from Superior Court, Effingham County; B. D. Evans, Judge.

Higman Bines was convicted of arson, and brings error. Reversed.

J. H Smith, for plaintiff in error.

Livingston Kenan, Sol. Gen., for the State.

FISH P.J.

The plaintiff in error was found guilty of the crime of arson and, upon his motion for a new trial being overruled, he excepted. The motion for a new trial was based upon the general grounds, upon alleged newly discovered evidence, and alleged error in overruling a motion to rule out certain evidence introduced by the state. Briefly stated, the evidence upon which the accused was found guilty was substantially as follows: The barn which he was charged to have feloniously burned was in the town of Marlow, belonged to J. F. McEachern, contained corn, hay, fodder, cotton seed hulls, and rice flour, and was discovered to be on fire shortly before or shortly after midnight. At the time of the fire, and for a considerable period of time before, the accused was in the employment of the owner of the barn working as a general helper around the owner's home and little farm, and feeding his horse and cattle. The keys to the barn had been kept hanging in the hall of McEachern's residence, and the accused generally had had free access to them, and carried them to and from the barn; but a short time before the fire occurred McEachern had moved to Jacksonville, and left these keys in charge of Mr. Yandall, a boarder, who was living in the residence, and he had carried them from then until the fire, in order to see that the barn was always locked and nothing taken from it. After Yandall took the keys and saw to the feeding of the stock, the accused seemed to Yandall, from his appearance and demeanor, to be mad. The accused lived, according to some of the witnesses, about a quarter of a mile from the barn, and according to others about half a mile therefrom. When the fire was discovered, an alarm was raised, a gun being fired several times, and there being a good deal of hallooing. The accused did not come to the fire that night, but made his appearance at the scene the next morning, and assisted in putting out the smoldering embers. Upon being then asked why he did not come to the fire, he said he never gave it a thought. Several other people lived in the same immediate neighborhood as the accused, and none of them came to the fire. The accused and a number of others, on the night of the fire, attended meeting at a church about half a mile below Marlow, and the people left the church after the 10 o'clock train had passed, and the defendant, in company with some of his neighbors, went in the direction of his home. One of the state's witnesses testified that he lived within 100 feet of the defendant's house, and that after he left the church he went to his home, and went to sleep, and did not wake up until the next morning. A witness named Anna Duncan testified that she lived right across the street from the house of the accused; that on the night of the fire she went to bed after she got through her work, and some time in the night her son came and awakened her, and she let him in the house; that in a few minutes after her son came in and went to bed she heard the accused rattling a chain against the door, and, after the chain rattled, she heard a small whistle, which she thought ought to be the defendant's whistle; that she recognized his whistle, for she knew "he has that low whistle ever since his mother has been dead." On the morning after the fire the accused was heard to say that he "didn't reckon there would be any more hell raised about the keys now." On the day after the fire Mrs. McEachern said to the defendant that, if he had been at the church on the previous night, he would have seen the fire, and asked him if he saw the fire "last night," and he replied, "No, ma'am; I went home and went to bed." He also said to her little daughter: "You know the book you gave me. I read it a while, and went right to bed." The jailer testified that while the accused was in jail he went in there to give him his breakfast, and "he played off asleep or crazy"; that the accused was lying down with his head against the wall of the cell. The witness called him, and he did not answer, and the witness kicked the wall to awaken him, and still got no response, and then went out into the corridor, and saw that the accused was watching every movement that he made. The witness went out and stayed a good while, and came back, and found the accused up; questioned and talked to him a good deal about it; and the accused then said "his intention was to make his escape some way or other, as he could"; that if he could have gotten the jailer in his cell he was going to get out and have a little combat with him and make his escape. A witness named Barney Jackson testified that he lived in Savannah, and was sent up to Marlow as a detective; that he found out where the accused lived, and went to his house one night about 9 or 10 o'clock--had never met him before--and told him he would like to get a place to stay if he could, and asked the accused if he could take him in for the night; that the accused told him he could not, as he was looking for some one to come over there, but if the witness would go off, and come back later, he (the accused) would be "more than apt to let him stay over with him"; that the witness did not go back there that night, but went back the next morning about 10 o'clock; found the accused building a fence, and, after some considerable conversation with him, told the accused that his (Jackson's) home was in Montgomery, Ala., and that he had to make his escape from there, and when the accused asked him what for, he said, "Some white folks who I had been working for owed me seventeen or eighteen dollars, and I had to set the stable on fire, with two or three horses;" and then the accused said he was working for Mr. McEachern, and used to handle the keys; that the lady let him handle them; and he used to have a good thing, but finally she took the keys away from him; and that he, about a month before this conversation, after the crowd at the church had disappeared, concealed himself, and went over to Mr. McEachern's barn and set it on fire. The accused introduced no evidence. In his statement to the jury he said he was at the church "that night," and when the "church was out" went home, and knew nothing about the fire until the next morning about 6 o'clock. He did not deny anything the witnesses had testified.

1. It seems to us very clear from this evidence that the accused was unlawfully convicted. The evidence is insufficient to support a verdict of guilty. There was no proof whatever of the corpus delicti, except the confession of the accused made to a negro detective, upon a few hours' acquaintance, and under circumstances which rendered the story told by this witness not very plausible. The jury, however, believed the testimony of this witness to be true, and therefore we are to take the confession as having been proved. Before there can be a lawful conviction of a crime, the corpus delicti--that is, that the crime charged has been committed by some one--must be proved. The mere confession of the accused is not sufficient to establish the corpus delicti. This rule is well established, in this country at least; and our own case of Murray v. State, 43 Ga. 256, is, so far as this court is concerned, controlling authority to this effect. In that case the accused was charged with having feloniously burned a ginhouse. He confessed that he "put fire to it about 1 o'clock at night," and the state proved that the house was consumed by fire about the hour of 1 o'clock at...