Com. v. Edwards

• Decision Date: 05 January 1959
• Citation: 147 A.2d 313,394 Pa. 335
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania v. Curtis Raymond EDWARDS, Appellant.
• Court: Pennsylvania Supreme Court

Page 313

147 A.2d 313

394 Pa. 335

COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania v. Curtis Raymond EDWARDS, Appellant.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Jan. 5, 1959.

Rehearing Denied Jan. 12, 1959.

Donald J. Goldberg, Garfield W. Levy, Levy & Oliensis, Philadelphia, for appellant.

James McGirr Kelly and Juanita Kidd Stout, Asst. Dist. Attys., James N. Lafferty, First Asst. Dist. Atty., Victor H. Blanc, Dist. Atty., Philadelphia, for appellee.

Before CHARLES ALVIN JONES, C. J., and BELL, MUSMANNO, BENJAMIN R. JONES, COHEN and BOK, JJ.

MUSMANNO, Justice.

On June 22, 1957, in the city of Philadelphia, Curtis Raymond Edwards, being then 14 years and 11 months of age, shot and killed Martin Daniels, Sr. He was indicted for murder and found guilty of murder in the first degree with the penalty fixed at life imprisonment. He has appealed for a new trial, alleging trial errors. Only one needs to be considered.

The defense was insanity. The Trial Judge charged the jury:

'Now, if you find that the defense of insanity, as I have outlined it to you, has been established by a fair preponderance of the evidence, then you should render a verdict of acquittal. However, if you do not believe the defense of insanity has been proved by a fair preponderance of the evidence by the defendant upon whom the burden rests, then you must fix the degree of crime by a verdict of guilty of either murder in the first degree with penalty of death, or murder in the first degree with penalty of life imprisonment; or murder in the second degree or voluntary manslaughter. You must weigh the evidence as you find the facts under the law as I have instructed you and arrive at one, and only one, of the five possible verdicts which I have now submitted to you.'

Under this charge the Trial Judge ruled out the possibility of a simple verdict of Not Guilty. He told the jury that they could render a verdict of acquittal because of insanity but not for any other reason. He said that they could return 'one, and only one' of the five possible verdicts he enumerated. These five possible verdicts were:

1. Not Guilty because of insanity

2. First degree murder with death

3. First degree murder with life imprisonment

4. Second degree murder

5. Voluntary Manslaughter

But suppose the jury did not believe that a crime had been committed or, if committed, that the defendant was not the one who had done the deed. The Commonwealth, emphasizing that the defendant killed Martin Daniels, Sr., and that the defendant admitted the killing, argues:

'It seems ridiculous to require the Trial Court to continue to charge on the presumption of innocence once the defendant had admitted the circumstances surrounding the offense.'

History has demonstrated that there have been many so-called ridiculous cases in which innocent persons have been accused of crime and often unjustly convicted, even executed. It is not for the prosecuting officials to say whether the position of the defendant, insofar as the judge's charge is concerned, is ridiculous or not.

The Commonwealth says further:

'While a presumption of innocence continues until there is a conviction, it would be unreasonable to expect a jury to acquit an admitted slayer who had absolutely no justification or excuse for committing the slaying.'

But it must still be left to the jury to decide whether an admitted slayer had or did not have justification or excuse for what he did. While it may be true that in the majority of cases where the slayer admits to the slaying, there can be little or no justification or excuse for the homicide, there have been deaths which the law has acknowledged as unavoidable or justified under the circumstances. Many automobile mishaps fall within the former category and self-defense killings come within the latter.

To say that a judge need not charge on an indispensible requirement in the law because the defendant is assuredly guilty is to hang that accused first and indict him afterwards. It is the trial and the trial alone which decides whether a defendant is assuredly guilty. The presumption of innocence is not merely a papier-mache figure for dramatic display in the courtroom; it is a reality without which trials become mere playacting with the verdict residing in the judge's pocket before the jury is sworn. Even, if in a hypothetical case, th evidence of guilt piles as high as Mt. Everest on Matterhorn, even if the District Attorney conscientiously believes the defendant to be as guilty as Cain, and no matter with what certainty the Judge views the culpability of the accused at the bar, the defendant is still entitled to all the safeguards of a fair trial as announced in the Constitution and the law of the land. An eminent English author, in a recently published book, said that 'the rules governing the admissibility of evidence are something of a mystery to a man in the street, who is apt to think of them as lawyers' hocus-pocus. This view is unwarranted. Though they sometimes seem--and sometimes are--mechanical and arbitrary in operation, such rules are based on long and rich experience of what is required to protect the individual.' ¹

In the same manner, there are certain rules concerning a judge's charge which simply cannot be ignored since they are based on long and rich experience of what is required to protect the individual accused of crime.

Our system of jurisprudence is based on precedent. To allow a glaring omission in a judge's charge to go uncorrected would mean that in future trials where the evidence to convict would not be so over-whelming as the District Attorney and the lower Court believe it to be in this case, a similar omission could not be complained of because this case would be cited as a precedent. It will be recalled that when Bassanio asked that the law be modeled to suit his pressing needs, Portia answered:

'It must not be; there is no power in Venice

Can alter a decree established:

'Twill be recorded for a precedent,

And many an error, by the same example,

Will rush into the state: it cannot be.' ²

Not to order a new trial in the case at hand would be to set our approval on an error and by that example, error could be cited as authority, and a misleading sign-board would rise on the highway of truth.

The Commonwealth incredulously asks:

'Is the Trial Court to be held to a slavish unthinking charge or should the Trial Judge expect a jury to act as reasoning men and women, when the facts are not in dispute?'

It is not for the Commonwealth or for the Trial Court to decide whether a basic and elementary feature of a charge should be omitted, on the basis of prophetic certainty that the jury will return a verdict of guilty because of facts which seemingly are not in dispute. The law of the Commonwealth places in the hands of the jury the exclusive responsibility of deciding guilt, and the Court may not restrict the jury's possible conclusions to a number which excludes the very important one of not guilty. Otherwise, the law would authorize a Trial Court to give binding instructions in favor of the Commonwealth which, of course, is not only 'unthinking' but unthinkable. In Commonwealth v. Flax, 331 Pa. 145, 154-155, 200 A. 632, 637, this Court said:

'When a defendant in a murder indictment enters a plea of 'not guilty', the burden is put upon the Commonwealth to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, either of murder in the first degree, or murder in the second degree, or voluntary manslaughter, or otherwise the Commonwealth must suffer an acquittal. The defendant is under no obligation to take the stand and deny or explain or attempt to excuse the homicide, but if he does, and he explains or attempts to excuse it on the theory of self-defense or of an accidental killing, and even though the theory thus advanced by him in his testimony is rejected by the jury, the burden still remains on the Commonwealth to prove the essential ingredients of at least one of the crimes charged in the indictment before it is entitled to a conviction.'

The Commonwealth contends further that:

'The proper test is whether or not the charge as a whole is accurate and fair and contains no basic or prejudicial error and a conviction should be sustained even if isolated excerpts taken from the charge might be objectionable.'

But the fault in the Judge's charge here is not the matter of an isolated excerpt being objectionable, although even in that case a reversal would be imperative if the excerpt in question was capable of misleading the jury. Here we have, not an 'isolated excerpt' but a definite and positive instruction at the end of a long charge which covered 66 legal size sheets in the typewritten transcript. Since the defense was that of insanity the Judge perforce had to devote attention to the subject of psychiatry as introduced by medical witnesses. Some of this testimony, as psychiatric evidence can without too much effort be, was abstruse and ambiguous. The jury looked to the Judge for clarification and direction.

The facts in the case are briefly as follows. As already noted, the defendant Edwards killed Martin Daniels, Sr. The son of the deceased Daniels, Martin Daniels, Jr., a boy some 14 years, had been a close friend and companion of the defendant Edwards for four or five years. From time to time the junior Daniels related to Edwards stories of how his father brutally beat him, how he struck him with his fists, kicked him, and otherwise manhandled him, how he also struck his mother, how he betrayed her, and so on. These stories had a marked effect on Edwards who, himself, knew something of paternal tyranny, his own father having used physical violence both on him and his mother over a period of time. Edwards' father was evidently a very bad man because the State, after appropriate preliminaries, duly electrocuted him.

Edwards reacted keenly to what he heard about the senior Daniels' cruelties and brutalities, some of which he witnessed himself...