Givens v. State
| Decision Date | 06 December 1899 |
| Citation | 55 S.W. 1107,103 Tenn. 648 |
| Parties | GIVENS v. STATE. |
| Court | Tennessee Supreme Court |
Error to circuit court, Jefferson county; W. R. Hicks, Judge.
Charles H. Givens was convicted of murder in the first degree, and brings error. Affirmed.
W. F Park and W. J. McSween, for plaintiff in error.
G. W Pickle, Atty. Gen., for the State.
The plaintiff in error was, after indictment and trial, found guilty of the murder of his wife. The indictment contained two counts. The first of these charged him with feloniously willfully, deliberately, premeditatedly, and with malice aforethought committing murder in the first degree upon the body of his wife, Martha J. Givens. The second count charged that unlawfully, willfully, feloniously, premeditatedly, and of malice aforethought he counseled, commanded, hired procured, and induced one John W. Dawn to kill and murder her. A motion to quash this second count was made upon the ground that it failed to charge that Dawn, "in consequence of said hiring, commanding, procuring," etc., "did in fact kill and murder the said Martha J. Givens." This motion was overruled, and the action of the trial judge in this regard is assigned as error.
We agree with the court below in its holding. The count in question, after charging that plaintiff in error "unlawfully, willfully, deliberately, feloniously, premeditatedly, and of his malice aforethought did counsel, command, hire, procure, and induce one John W. Dawn, on the day and year aforesaid, in the state and county aforesaid, unlawfully, willfully, feloniously, deliberately, premeditatedly, and of his malice aforethought to kill and murder one Martha J. Givens with certain guns and pistols, by shooting her and killing" her "with said weapons," then adds, "whereby, of the wounds and effects thereof," she "instantly then and there died." The rule is that the statement of the offense should be sufficiently certain to notify the defendant and the court of the nature of the crime charged, and to enable the defendant to plead any judgment which may be rendered in the case as a bar to a subsequent prosecution for the same offense. We think this count answers the requirements of this rule. A fair and reasonable construction of its language gave notice to the defendant that he was charged with hiring Dawn to murder Mrs. Givens, and that, as a result of this hiring, she was murdered by him. It is true, apter words might have been used to express the latter part of the charge; but to hold, as it is now insisted, that they fail to aver murder by Dawn as the result of the previous procurement by the defendant, would be not only to violate the ordinary rules for the construction of language, but also to run counter to the will of the legislature as expressed in the Code (Shannon's Code, §§ 7077, 7078), and the growing inclination of this court, repeatedly announced, to escape from the embarrassment of technicalities that are "empty and without reason, and tend to defeat law and right" ( Wallace v. State, 2 Lea, 35; State v. Staley, 3 Lea, 567; Glidewell v. State, 15 Lea, 135; Isham v. State, 1 Sneed, 111; Hale v. State, 1 Cold. 168; Woods v. State, 14 Lea, 461). This assignment is therefore overruled.
Having disposed of this preliminary question, it is proper, in view of the contention that the evidence does not support the verdict, to state the facts found in the record upon which rests the conviction of the plaintiff in error of murder in the first degree under the first count in the indictment. The theory of the state was and is that plaintiff in error had become greatly infatuated with one Sarah Jane Worsham, with whom he had sustained criminal relations up to a short time before she left the neighborhood of the home of the plaintiff in error to join her husband in another state, and this infatuation led him to take steps to have his wife murdered that, in order to accomplish this, he employed one Dawn, a young nephew of his, who had been partially raised by him, and who was under his domination, to perpetrate the act; that on the night of the homicide he induced his wife to seat herself in front of an uncurtained window, where the upper part of her body was exposed to the view of Dawn, who was on the outside of the house, and who, with a gun that had been examined by the plaintiff in error, and prepared by him for the deed, fired the fatal shot. The state further insists that, in order to divert suspicion from himself, plaintiff in error took a seat near his wife, but out of range of the assassin's gun, and protected from it by the jamb of the window, and was sitting there, under the pretense of reading a newspaper, when the shot which killed her was fired by Dawn. The facts to support this theory are numerous, and, it is insisted by the state, place its truth beyond all reasonable doubt. That the plaintiff in error had sustained criminally intimate relations with Mrs. Worsham is confessed by him. Five letters, which he admits were from him to her, are in the record. These letters were evidently written to and received by her a short time before she left that neighborhood with a view of rejoining her husband, and when, it would seem, for some reason, she had broken off, or was about to break off, her relations with Givens. They indicate his infatuation for this woman, and a state of mind bordering on frenzy because of her change of demeanor to him and his anticipated separation from her. They are full of crude and extravagant expressions of love for her, reproaches for her late coldness to him, and protestations that life without her would be intolerable. The fact of his attachment to Mrs. Worsham, and their exchange of notes and letters, as shown by the record, had come to the knowledge of Mrs. Givens, resulting in great distress of mind to her. The husband and wife had disagreements growing out or this knowledge, which, at least on his part, were angry and exasperating. To a witness who was sent for at the time of one of these disagreements, and who found Mrs. Givens in tears, the plaintiff in error said, "people that she [his wife] talked about were as good as she." Another witness who worked for and with Givens testified that the latter and his wife had trouble about this woman, and when, on one occasion, in her grief, she was seeking to dissuade him from visiting this woman, he had heard Givens tell her he would go and do as he pleased. To this witness Givens made a proposition, looking to the killing of the husband of Mrs. Worsham, and at the same time he talked of going off with her. To still another witness, who was working with him, he told a story of a man in North Carolina who hired another to kill his wife, and he (Givens) asked the witness if he knew of any method by which they could get his wife out of the way, and said, if it could be done, then he and witness would go to Knoxville, and have a good time with whisky and women. This is a sufficient reference to the record to show both motive and purpose. Mrs. Givens was killed about 7 1/4 o'clock of the evening of the 18th or 19th of April, 1896. It is a matter worthy of notice that Mrs. Worsham had left for Indiana or Illinois only a short time before,--according to one of the witnesses, about the 1st of that April. In the late afternoon preceding the killing, Dawn was observed going down to a pasture not very far from Givens' house. Givens had arranged with the owner for the pasturage of his horse there for a few days. Dawn was seen by at least one witness in this pasture. He went down on foot, and in a little while, and not long before sundown, he was followed by Givens on horseback. About dusk Givens was observed coming back, and going in the direction of his home, and later Dawn also returned. Dawn stopped at the house of a neighbor for a short time, picking a banjo, and then laid it down, saying he was going across the river to see his sweetheart, but instead went towards the home of Givens. Within a few minutes thereafter the little village was alarmed by the loud report of a gun, followed soon by cries of lamentation coming from there. Neighbors at once gathered, and they found the body of Mrs. Givens lying on the floor, the head, neck, and other upper portions of the body perforated with shot or balls, from the effect of which she instantly died. The plaintiff in error, as were his young children, was indulging in expressions of grief. When asked by his neighbors how the killing occurred, he said that just before the shooting his wife had taken her seat at the sewing machine, which stood in front of the window, to do some sewing for him; that, in order to shade her eyes from the light of the lamp which stood on it, he had placed his hat on her head, and that he then sat down at the end of the sewing machine, and was engaged in reading a Sunday school paper, when he was astounded by the report of the gun, followed by the fall of his wife's body to the floor. He added that he thought that the shot was intended for him, and that, as his wife had on his hat, the assassin had mistakenly fired at her for him. The weapon with which the killing was done was fired from the outside. The shot or balls, in entering, broke one or more panes of...
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