Commonwealth v. Plubell
| Decision Date | 21 May 1951 |
| Citation | 80 A.2d 825,367 Pa. 452 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. PLUBELL. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
Anna M. Plubell was convicted in the Court of Oyer and Terminer Clearfield County, No. 14, February Sessions, 1950, F. Cortez Bell, J., of voluntary manslaughter, and she appealed. The Supreme Court, No. 104, January Term, 1951, Jones, J., held that statements made by the deceased after receiving a five inch knife would in his right chest were admissible as dying declarations, subject to their relevancy and materiality.
Judgment reversed and new trial granted.
In homicide prosecution, statements made by deceased in presence of doctor and nurse at hospital to effect that " it was a family quarrel", or " family trouble", were too vague and indefinite to be either relevant or material even if competent as dying declarations.
William C. Chase, Clearfield, for appellant.
Joseph A. Dague, Dist. Atty., Dan P. Arnold, Asst. Dist. Atty., Clearfield, for appellee.
Before DREW, C. J., and STERN, STEARNE, JONES, BELL, LADNER and CHIDSEY, JJ.
The appellant was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter upon the trial of an indictment charging her with the murder of her husband. She moved in arrest of judgment and also for a new trial. Both motions were refused and the court thereupon entered judgment of sentence on the verdict from which the defendant has appealed. The motion in arrest of judgment has been abandoned and properly so; it was plainly without merit.
The alleged errors upon which the appellant relies are (1) the trial court's rejection of testimony as to voluntary statements, favorable to the defendant, which the victim allegedly made a few minutes after he had received his fatal wound and, also, while on his way to and at the hospital where he died within two hours of his wound and (2) the holding of a conference by the court with counsel in chambers during the progress of the trial, out of the presence of the defendant, relating to the above-mentioned exclusion of testimony.
The homicide took place between 5 and 6 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon in December in the one-story dwelling of the appellant and her husband, Earl Plubell, in Lawrence Township, Clearfield County, adjoining the Borough of Clearfield. The killing climaxed quarreling between the Plubells which had begun at the time of the husband's return home around 4 P.M. from Clearfield where, in company with one Maines, he had visited and patronized several drinking establishments. He brought Maines home with him and confronted his wife with alleged statements of Maines reflecting on her chastity. Mrs. Plubell repudiated the imputations and Maines denied that he had said any such things. That matter apparently ended there. However, the quarreling was subsequently renewed and terminated in the fatal wounding of Plubell. In order to place in proper prospective the evidentiary question which the appellant raises, it is necessary to relate some of the sordid circumstances leading up to, attending and following the infliction of the mortal injury as testified to at trial.
Plubell had continued to drink beer at home and was in irritable and belligerent mood. At one time he threw his wife to the floor of the dining room and struck her while she lay there. In the final altercation, which took place in the kitchen, according to the Commonwealth's only eyewitness, an eleven year old girl, Mona Jean Wright, Plubell hit his wife in the face and backed her up against a wall. He grasped a carving or bread knife lying on the kitchen table and threw it at her, barely missing her body. He picked up the knife from the floor, where it had fallen after striking the wall, and handed it to her with the challenge, ‘ Now, stab me, God damn you, if you want to.’ When the witness was asked what then happened, she replied that Mrs. Plubell ‘ stabbed Earl’ and, again, that she ‘ stuck him’ . The defendant claimed the stabbing was accidental, that when she had hold of the knife, her husband lunged at her and the knife entered his body. In any event, he received a knife wound in the right chest to a depth of slightly more than five inches which caused a hemorrhage of the lung from which he bled profusely. Mrs. Plubell called Walter Wright (Mona's father) who was in the dining room adjoining, telling him that she had cut Earl and that Wright should call a doctor. Wright hurried into the kitchen and, seeing Plubell standing there with his shirt open and blood flowing from the wound to the floor, replied, ‘ Doctor, hell, he needs an ambulance.’ Plubell's own comment was,-‘ By God, Cotton [Wright's nickname], she got me that time.’ Wright ran to a nearby neighbor's where there was a telephone, directed that an ambulance be summoned and immediately ran back to the Plubell house, all in a space of two to three minutes. By that time, Plubell, weakened from loss of blood and attendant shock, was holding on to the sink. Wright placed his arm about him and eased him onto the floor. The ambulance arrived within ten minutes and returned in about the same time to the hospital where the patient was admitted at 5:50 P.M. and died an hour and a half later. In addition to the driver of the ambulance, three men, including Wright, accompanied Plubell to the hospital. He was received upon arrival there by a doctor and nurse. All of these people heard the wounded man make statements concerning the circumstances of his injury which the court excluded when offered by the defendant.
At trial, Mona Jean Wright, after having testified to Plubell's statement-‘ By God, Cotton, she got me this time’ -was asked by defendant's counsel in cross-examination whether she had not also heard Plubell say to her father that ‘ it [i. e., the stabbing] is as much my fault as it is hers.’ The question was objected to by the district attorney as not proper cross-examination, but the learned trial judge overruled the objection and the witness answered, ‘ No.’ When Walter Wright later took the stand as a Commonwealth's witness, he also testified to Plubell's remark about the defendant's having ‘ got [him] this time’ but, when asked in cross-examination whether Plubell had said anything else to him in the kitchen following the stabbing, the district attorney objected and the court sustained the objection on the ground that the matter sought to be elicited was not proper cross-examination. We think the action of the court in such regard was harmful error.
The learned trial judge thought that the statement addressed by Plubell to ‘...
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