Campbell v. State
| Decision Date | 06 October 1966 |
| Docket Number | No. 23634,23634 |
| Citation | 151 S.E.2d 132,222 Ga. 570 |
| Parties | Gwendolyn CAMPBELL v. The STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Syllabus by the Court
1. The general grounds of the motion for new trial are without merit as the evidence was sufficient to support the jury's verdict.
2. It was not error to exclude the question: 'How many times have you seen him, the deceased, with a pistol about his person?' as the question called for specific acts which are not admissible to prove general character for violence.
B. Hugh Ansley, Atlanta, for appellant.
Lewis R. Slaton, Sol. Gen., Paul Ginsberg, Amber W. Anderson, J. Walter LeCraw, Arthur K. Bolton, Atty. Gen., G. Ernest Tidwell, Exec. Asst. Atty. Gen., Carter A. Setliff, Asst. Atty. Gen., Atlanta, for appellee.
Gwendolyn Campbell was indicted, tried, and convicted of the murder of one Willie James Heard by shooting him with a pistol and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The appeal is from that judgment and sentence. She enumerates as error the overruling of her motion for new trial on the general grounds, and the refusal of the court to permit a witness to answer the question: 'How many times have you seen the deceased with a pistol about his person?'
1. The general grounds. The accused admitted in her statement that she shot and killed the deceased, Willie James Heard, but stated that it was because he had hurt her and that she was not going to take any chance on him hurting her again, 'I didn't intend to kill him, but I did, I was trying to stop him from hurting me.' The evidence and statement of defendant would support the jury's finding that the deceased had a wife and children but at the same time was living with the defendant; that deceased's wife knew of it and had confronted the defendant and her husband while together, and he admitted it and said he intended to continue to live with both of them; that about three months before defendant shot and killed the deceased, he had, in an argument with defendant, shot her in the leg; that defendant told police she shot herself; that on the night before the killing, defendant, deceased, and another man occupied the same room in defendant's house, and defendant accused deceased of stealing $28.00 from her ($25.00 of which he had given her) and $16.00 from the other man. She told him she wanted him to stay away from her house. They engaged in a fight, she stating that he hit and pushed her and she hit and pushed him. At that time and at the time of the killing, two women, both drunk, and another man, Willie Ballard, were in the house, none of whom testified in the case.
Calvin Hill, a cousin of the defendant, testified that as he entered the house, deceased and defendant were fighting with their hands; that neither had a weapon as far as he could see; that she left the front room and went into the middle room and the deceased then came into the middle room; that it was about five or ten minutes after the deceased went into the middle room before he was killed. While they were fighting, she did not have a gun and he had nothing in his hand that he, the witness, could see; that he heard defendant ask Willie Ballard for a gun; that defendant then came into the room with a pistol in her hand; that he, the witness, told her to put the gun down, but she did not do so; and, that the deceased was standing over in front of the heater with both hands in his pockets. The defendant said: 'Willie, you done shot me once, what am I supposed to do about it?' So he said: 'Shoot me back.' So she said: 'You mean shoot you?' 'Yeah, shoot me' and she shot him. The gun snapped two or three times before it fired. The witness testified further that so far as he could see, the deceased had no knife or weapon of any kind at the time he was shot.
In her statement, the defendant said that she had Willie were fighting, that she pushed him away from her, that he was standing near 'the shelf' and he reached up on the shelf, she didn't see him get anything, that she ran into the middle room and then into the front-room and got the pistol from a drawer, went back into the middle room and shot Willie. Deceased owned the gun.
It is very difficult to tell from the testimony just what happened, but there was sufficient evidence to support the...
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