Hudson v. The State Of Ga.

• Decision Date: 31 March 1886
• Citation: 76 Ga. 727
• Parties: Hudson. vs. The State of Georgia.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

76 Ga. 727

Hudson. vs. The State of Georgia.

Supreme Court of the State of Georgia

MARCH TERM, 1886.

Attorney and Client. Criminal Law. Practice in Superior Court. Before Judge Clarke. Clay Superior Court. September Term, 1885.

Reported in the decision.

R. H. Powell; W. O. Butler, for plaintiff in error.

Clifford Anderson, attorney general; J. H. Guerry, solicitor general, by E. C. Bower, for the state.

Hall, Justice.

Willis Hudson was indicted jointly with two others, his mother and half sister. The mother, Sarah Ann Roney, died in prison previously, and he and the sister, Isabella Roney, severed on the trial. He was found guilty; and sentenced to death, and thereupon he made a motion for a new trial, which was overruled by the court, and he brought the case here on bill of exceptions and writ of error.

(1.) Besides the ground that the verdict is against evidence, etc., the others are:

(2.) That through his ignorance, and the oversight and inefficieney of his attorneys, he failed to avail himself of the privilege of making a statement to the effect that he shot deceased in defence of his mother and sister.

(3.) That one of his attorneys was a young man of very limited experience, and the other was so constantly under the influence of liquor during the trial as to incapacitate him for the management of the case, the result being that his right to make a statement was overlooked, and that his counsel clashed in their arguments before the jury, one contending that the homicide was justifiable, and the other confining his address to the jury to an appeal for mercy, viz., to an appeal that the jury would not condemn him to the gallows, but would send him to the penitentiary for life.

On the first point, the judge certifies that the prisoner did not appear to be unusually ignorant.

On the second point, he certifies that he did not observe anything indicating that either of prisoner's counsel was drunk, and that whilst he noticed counsel treated the case differently in their addresses to the jury, he did not observe any necessary conflict, —one arguing that the case was one of justifiable homicide, whilst the other, without touching on that view of the case, appealed to the jury not to condemn the prisoner to the gallows.

1. If the state's witnesses are to be credited (and the jury had a right to believe them in preference to the defendant's), then this verdict is fully sustained. The only pretense of any palliation or excuse for this homicide is found in the fact testified to by the prisoner's co defend-ant and sister, that at the time he shot deceased, the latter was attempting to cut her and her mother with his knife; but this fact is directly negatived by the only other witness who was present at the transaction, and indirectly by several others who reached the scene of the conflict shortly after the tragedy, and who made search, but found no knife on the ground at or near the place where the body was lying, nor on the person of deceased, except an ordinary pocket-knife, shut and lying in one of the pockets of his pantaloons. There are other facts testified to which were uncontradicted, and which strongly tended to show the improbability of this story about the use of the knife. The jury were authorized to infer a conspiracy between these three defendants to take the life of deceased, from the fact that Isabella Roney and deceased\'s wife, after engaging in an angry and violent altercation, separated, the former declaring that she would get her crowd and return and beat the latter. The female defendants in a short time returned, armed with a " battling stick " and other sticks, and commenced the conflict, and when deceased interposed for the protection of his wife, each of the women seized and...