Guinn v. State
| Decision Date | 14 February 1928 |
| Docket Number | 8 Div. 684 |
| Citation | 22 Ala.App. 331,115 So. 417 |
| Parties | GUINN v. STATE. |
| Court | Alabama Court of Appeals |
Appeal from Circuit Court, Franklin County; Charles P. Almon, Judge.
Omer Guinn was convicted of murder in the second degree, and he appeals. Reversed and remanded.
H.H Hamilton, of Russellville, for appellant.
Charlie C. McCall, Atty. Gen., for the State.
The indictment charged murder in the first degree. The defendant filed two pleas: (1) Not guilty; (2) not guilty by reason of insanity.
The evidence without conflict discloses that defendant killed deceased by shooting her with a pistol under circumstances which would authorize a jury to find the defendant guilty of murder. Nor was there any evidence tending to reduce the homicide to a lower degree than that found by the jury. This being a fact, we have read the entire record and find that no ruling of the court was prejudicial to the defendant upon this issue. Any ruling made by the court upon the admission of testimony to which objection was made could not have affected the finding of the jury upon this issue one way or another.
The real issue litigated was the insanity of defendant at the time of the homicide. We therefore address the opinion to that phase of the case. Was the defendant at the time of the homicide able to distinguish between the right and the wrong as applied to the act here charged; or, having such capacity was he by duress of mental disease in such condition that he had so far lost the power to choose between the right and the wrong as not to avoid doing the act in question, so that his free agency was at the time of the commission of the act destroyed; and at the same time the homicide was so connected with such mental disease, in relation of cause and effect as to have been the product or offspring of it solely? The burden of establishing the plea of insanity rests on the defendant. The foregoing is the rule in this state, many times stated in various language meaning the same thing, and was so correctly charged in the case at bar. Parsons v State, 81 Ala. 577, 2 So. 854, 60 Am.Rep. 193.
In making proof as to the sanity of the defendant under the plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, nonexperts whose intimacy with the defendant and opportunities for observation have been such as to enable them to form correct judgments of defendant's mental condition may not only testify to facts and acts, but may give their opinion as to defendant's sanity at the time when the offense was committed. Norris v. State, 16 Ala. 776; Douglass v. State, 21 Ala.App. 289, 107 So. 791. The various rulings of the court upon the admission of nonexpert testimony as to sanity were without error.
During the examination of the witness Clara Guinn, the daughter of defendant, the court correctly ruled that she could not testify to the details of what took place between her deceased, and one Andy Carden. The question at issue was not what were the actual facts occurring between Clara, the deceased, and Carden, but what was told to defendant. The seduction or rape of Clara is not in issue here. The inquiry here to be...
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Farley v. State, 6 Div. 454.
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