Haywood v. State
| Decision Date | 06 May 1907 |
| Docket Number | 12,758 |
| Citation | 90 Miss. 461,43 So. 614 |
| Court | Mississippi Supreme Court |
| Parties | NAPOLEON HAYWOOD v. STATE OF MISSISSIPPI |
FROM the circuit court of, second district, Perry county, HON WILLIAM H. COOK, Judge.
Haywood the appellant, and another, were indicted for the murder of one Lydell; there was a severance, and appellant was separately tried, convicted of the murder, and sentenced to the penitentiary for life, from which conviction and sentence he appealed to the supreme court.
The dead body of Lydell was found in a pond in the vicinity of Hattiesburg. The appellant and one George Shelton, both negroes, were arrested, and subsequently indicted for murder. On the trial of appellant it appeared that deceased, on the evening before his death, was intoxicated, harassed by financial troubles and vexed by litigation; that he had been out of work for several weeks; and, on the evening mentioned he employed the appellant, a hack driver, to carry him to a house of ill fame, where he drank whiskey in company with the inmates of the place, after which he left, riding in the hack, driven by another than appellant, and his body was subsequently discovered in the pond. Physicians were introduced as witnesses on the trial and their testimony conflicted as to whether judging from the condition of the body when taken from the water and examined by them, the deceased was alive or dead when put in the pond. There was sufficient testimony, if credited, to have proved an alibi for appellant.
Gertrude Evans, an inmate of the resort, after testifying that Lydell the deceased, in company with one Tutt and another person spent some time at the place in company with several of the women, was asked by counsel for appellant if these persons had left Hattiesburg, and why they left; whether some of the women who were at the resort that night left the next morning for Birmingham, Alabama; and whether the women who were present that night were absent the next day. To all of these questions the state objected, and the objections were sustained.
Judgment reversed and cause remanded for new trial.
Luther James, for appellant.
The evidence under which appellant was convicted was all circumstantial. And, for this reason, it was error in the lower court to refuse the defense the right to show by the appellant's witness, Gertrude Evans, an inmate of the house of prostitution, that she knew that some of the women who were at the house of prostitution on the Thursday evening when the deceased was there, left early the next morning for Birmingham, Alabama. This witness was also not permitted by the lower court to answer the question, propounded by counsel for appellant, whether she did not know that the women who were inmates of the resort had practically all left the state by the next day. It is apparent that her answers would have shown that the inmates of this resort where Lydell was last seen alive by reputable witnesses had left the state on the morning after the alleged murder, and have not since been in this state. Such proof was material in view of the connection of the time and place when and where deceased was last seen alive, according to the evidence.
The court erroneously granted an instruction for the state to the effect that circumstantial evidence in law is as good as any other kind of evidence, and that whenever circumstantial evidence rises high enough in the scale of belief to generate full conviction in the minds of the jury of the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury should act upon such evidence as readily as they would in any other kind of evidence. Pitts v. State, 43 Miss. 472; Bourn v. State, 5 So. 626. The testimony should have been left to the jury unfettered by an instruction pointing out, as it were, the conclusion desired by the district attorney. The true test of the weight of circumstantial evidence is that it excludes all reasonable doubt of the defendant's innocence. Beavers v. State, 58 Ind. 530; Algheri v. State, 25 Miss. 584; James v. State, 45 Miss. 572.
The case should be reversed on the facts, as was the case of Allen v. State, 40 So. 744, wherein this court laid down the proposition that in a case supported entirely by circumstantial evidence, where no motive is shown, a verdict of guilty, in the face of unimpeached testimony for the state, would, nevertheless, be reversed.
A. C. Cherry, on the same side.
The evidence does not connect appellant with the death of Lydell in sufficient degree to show that appellant was in any way guilty of Lydell's death. Under the evidence, Lydell may have come to his death: (1) From death by natural means in the house of prostitution, and have been subsequently placed in the pond by the frightened inmates; or (2) from having walked by inadvertence over the steep bank of the pond, and been drowned before he could, in his drunken condition, save himself; or (3) he may have committed suicide, being worried by his financial troubles and grieved over the death of the party whose funeral notice was found in his pockets afterwards; or (4) he may have been put in the pond and there drowned by some one who thought he was dead, and who never intended to murder him. These are not unreasonable deductions from the evidence. Robinson v. State, 16 Tex. App., 347.
The action of the lower court in refusing to permit the witness, Gertrude Evans, to testify that all of the inmates, suddenly, without notice or warning, did the irregular thing of fleeing to another state the day after Lydell was at the resort, was error. This was a resort where intoxicants were sold; where prostitutes stayed; which Lydell had, all the day long, been making his base of operations, buying whisky and beer to excess, and where he was last seen by different persons, in company with a woman of the place.
The instruction for the state, criticised in the brief of my colleague, is certainly erroneous, under the circumstances. It is a dangerous thing, in any instance, to convict a man on circumstantial evidence alone. Moreover the instruction is argumentative. The weight and sufficiency of the evidence is for the jury alone.
George Butler, assistant attorney-general, for appellee.
Although complaint is made by appellant as to the action of the lower co...
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