Kannon v. State

• Decision Date: 31 December 1882
• Citation: 78 Tenn. 386
• Parties: Dan Kannon v. The State
• Court: Tennessee Supreme Court

78 Tenn. 386

Dan Kannon

v.The State

Supreme Court of Tennessee.

December Term, 1882.

FROM MAURY.

Appeal in error from the Circuit Court of Maury County. W. S. MCLEMORE, J.

ANDREW MCCLAIN and RUDOLPH for Kannon.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL LEA for The State.

COOPER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court.

The prisoner has appealed in error from a conviction of the crime of murder in the first degree.

The indictment is that the defendant, on August 28, 1870, “upon the bodies of Susan Kannon and one Mack Kannon, feloniously, etc., did make an assault, and with a large stick and other deadly weapons, them the said Susan and Mack feloniously, etc., did strike and wound, giving to them, the said Susan and Mack, several mortal wounds, etc., of which said mortal wounds, they, the said Susan Kannon and the said Mack Kannon, then and there died,” etc. The indictment contains all the requirements of a charge of murder in the first degree. The jury found the defendant guilty “of murder in the first decree as charged in the indictment.”

The testimony of several witnesses is to the effect that in August, 1870, the dead bodies of Susan Kannon, the wife of the prisoner, and Mack Kannon, their infant child, were found in the woods lot near to the house of the defendant, where he and his family lived. On the back of the head of the wife was a bruised place, which had bled freely, and the neck of the child seemed to be broken from the way the head fell about. One witness further testifies that a night or two before the bodies were thus found, the defendant came to the house of the witness and told him that he intended to kill his wife, because she was pregnant with a child by another man. Upon the witness undertaking to persuade him not to kill her but leave her, the defendant repeated that he intended to kill her and then hang himself. Another witness testifies that on the day the bodies were found the defendant came to the house of witness and told him that he had killed his wife and child, and that witness could find them over on the hill-side, and that he, defendant, was going to the woods to hang himself. The deputy sheriff, who arrested the prisoner, and another person who was with the deputy, testify that the defendant told them that he killed his wife and child; that he struck the wife with a hand-spike on the back of the head; that she had the child up in her arms with its head on her shoulder, when he struck her, and the lick broke its neck. He said that he had killed his wife because she was not true to him.

Susan Kannon, a daughter of the defendant by his deceased wife, who said at the trial in September, 1882, that she was sixteen years of age, and who, therefore, at the time of the killing must have been between three or four years of age, was examined as a witness. She testified that she saw her father kill her mother and Mack; that he struck his wife over the head with a rail, and struck her again after she fell; that he then took Mack by the heels, and mashed his brains out against a rock.

The verdict of the jury was guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment. The charge in the indictment was that the defendant had killed both the mother and child with the premeditation requisite to constitute that offense under the statute: Code, sec. 4598. There is evidence to sustain the verdict as to the mother, but not as to the child. The only testimony which can be relied on at all as tending to establish the necessary ingredients of murder in the first degree, as to the child, is the testimony of the defendant's daughter. But her testimony shows that the acts of killing the child was distinct from the act of killing the wife. And her recollection, if her language be taken literally, is shown not to be...