Granberry v. State

• Decision Date: 24 April 1913
• Citation: 182 Ala. 4,62 So. 52
• Parties: GRANBERRY v. STATE.
• Court: Alabama Supreme Court

62 So. 52

182 Ala. 4

GRANBERRY v. STATE.

Supreme Court of Alabama

April 24, 1913

Appeal from Law and Equity Court, Lee County; Lum Duke, Judge.

Hill Granberry was convicted of murder in the first degree, and he appeals. Reversed and remanded.

Charge 13 is as follows: "In order for this defendant to be responsible for the crime with which he is charged, he must have sufficient power of memory to recollect the relation in which he stands to others, and in which others stand to him that the act he is doing is contrary to the plain dictates of justice and right, and injurious to others, and the violation of the dictates of duty."

The other charges are as follows:

"(10) If from the evidence in this case you have a reasonable doubt that defendant was sufficiently sober to form a specific intent to take life, you cannot convict him of murder in the first degree."

"(20) The presumption in this case is that the defendant is innocent until the state has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that he is guilty; and, if the jury have a reasonable doubt growing out of the evidence as to whether he was sufficiently sober to form a specific intent to take life then the jury cannot find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree."

Henry K. Dickinson and John K. Watson, both of Opelika, for appellant.

R.C. Brickell, Atty. Gen., and W.L. Martin, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.

SAYRE J.

The defendant was convicted under an indictment which charged that he unlawfully, and with malice aforethought, killed Mariah Aldridge by striking her with an axe.

The state's principal witness testified that at the time of the killing he was at the house of deceased; that defendant, deceased, and one Irene Spratling were also there; that a dispute arose between defendant and the two women about making change for some whisky that defendant had sold to the women; that a fight ensued, in which defendant shot and killed Irene Spratling; that deceased immediately ran from the room in which the shooting was done into another room, whither defendant followed her; that he heard a scuffle and a gunshot in the room to which they went; that deceased then fled from the house, defendant in pursuit; that defendant picked up an axe as he passed the woodpile; that defendant overtook deceased several hundred yards up the road, and there killed her with the axe.

Defendant (appellant) here complains that his objection to the testimony showing the killing of the Spratling woman should have been sustained in the court below. Defendant's objection was clearly without merit. The evidence objected to tended to prove a distinct felony committed by the prisoner, for which he was not on trial, but it was admissible nevertheless for the reason that the killing of the two women constituted the res gestæ of one continuous transaction. The killing of each shed light upon the killing of the other, in that it tended strongly to show the hostile spirit which actuated defendant throughout the transaction. Smith v. State, 88 Ala. 73, 7 So. 52; Kennedy v. State, 62 So. 49.

It is common practice, and has often had the approval of this court, to give in evidence the weapon with which a homicide has been committed. The deadly character of the weapon used tends to show the felonious intent. In view of the connection between the two transactions and the tendency of each to illustrate the other, and in view especially of the inference which the jury may well have drawn that defendant first tried to kill deceased with the gun, there was no error in allowing the gun in evidence in this case.

Laura Miller, a witness for the state, testified that she lived within a few hundred yards of the home of deceased, Mariah Aldridge, and that defendant immediately after the killing came to her house and left a shotgun and two loaded shells with direction that they be given to his boy. Defendant had pleaded not guilty and the special plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The testimony of this witness tended to prove defendant's reasoned conduct immediately after the killing, and was competent in rebuttal of defendant's theory that his faculties were so disturbed and disordered that he could not have entertained the specific...