Kyle v. State

• Decision Date: 10 March 1961
• Citation: 208 Tenn. 170,344 S.W.2d 537,12 McCanless 170
• Parties: , 208 Tenn. 170 Noel G. KYLE v. STATE of Tennessee.
• Court: Tennessee Supreme Court

Page 537

344 S.W.2d 537

12 McCanless 170, 208 Tenn. 170

Noel G. KYLE v. STATE of Tennessee.

Supreme Court of Tennessee.

March 10, 1961.

Ray W. Churchill, Memphis, for plaintiff in error.

Walker T. Tipton, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.

BURNETT, Justice.

This appeal is from a conviction of driving an automobile while under the influence of an intoxicant. Code Section 59-1031, T.C.A. The sentence was twenty days imprisonment and a fine of $350. From this conviction a seasonable appeal has been perfected wherein the primary insistence is that there is no evidence of the corpus delicti. There are other insistences which will be commented on in the course of the opinion, but the gravamen of the defense is that there is no evidence of the corpus delicti.

On January 31, 1959, police officers of Memphis were summoned to investigate an accident at the intersection of Union Avenue and Main Street in the City of Memphis. When they arrived at this intersection they found an automobile parked in the center lane of Main Street, next to the center line, about twenty feet south of the intersection of Main Street and Union Avenue, headed in a southerly direction. The plaintiff in error was standing in the street at the rear of this automobile.

The officers approached the plaintiff in error and made inquiry as to the trouble and were informed by him that his car had been struck by a street railway bus a few minutes before. The officers checked and could find no evidence of a collision but observed in conversation with the plaintiff in error that he was under the influence of an intoxicant. He was thus taken to the car of the officers and questioned further. He told the officers that he had been in the southbound lane on Main Street and stopped in this lane of traffic when a Memphis railway bus had proceeded to pass him on the right side and hit his car. In this conversation the officers formulated the opinion that the plaintiff in error was intoxicated and thus it was that they took him to the City Hall for further examination. While there and being further examined the plaintiff in error admitted to them that he was driving this automobile and that it was his car. Thus it was that under this state of facts the arrest was made for driving while under the influence of an intoxicant and the conviction from which this appeal stems.

As said in the outset the gravamen of the appeal is based on the proposition that there was no proof of the corpus delicti and thus the plaintiff in error's confession made to these officers would not be admissible. There are eight assignments in all, but most of them go to the proposition that there is no evidence to sustain the verdict. Of course, if the proposition is borne out that there is no proof of the corpus delicti then this proposition would obviate any further consideration here.

In this State we have long followed the rule that a confession is not admissible in the absence of some proof of the corpus delicti and that a confession upon such uncorroborated evidence cannot be sustained. Ashby v. State, 124 Tenn. 684, 139 S.W. 872, 875. See likewise Wharton's Criminal Evidence (Anderson) at Section 357 and 358, Volume 2. This Court said in the Ashby case, supra: 'while the corpus delicti cannot be established by confessions alone, yet the confessions may be taken in connection with other evidence, direct or circumstantial, corroborating them, and, if from all of the evidence so considered together the corpus delicti and the guilt of the person with reference thereto is established beyond a reasonable doubt, it is the duty of the jury to convict.' Likewise it was held in this case it was not necessary that this evidence of a corpus delicti precede the introduction of the confession though it was best to do so; but if it came in the wrong order the Court would not reverse. This case and the holding above quoted has been affirmed many times since as will be observed by Shepardizing the case.

Of course, the term 'corpus delicti' as applied to the particular offense here charged means that the State must establish that the plaintiff in error operated his automobile upon one of the streets of Memphis in an intoxicated condition. The corpus delicti is made up of two elements: (a) commission of the crime, and (b) the criminal responsibility therefor. The proof of the plaintiff in error's agency as the doer of the crime, while an essential requisite in order to convict, does not form a part of the corpus delicti. Wharton, supra, in his very able discussion of the question here under consideration shows in the Sections above cited that any, as he calls it, 'inculpatory facts' discovered by reason of an inadmissible confession are admitted by all the courts. Then he says in Section 358, supra, that: 'The search made as a consequence of information given by the accused must result in the discovery of inculpatory facts, as otherwise no testimony, either as to confession, or as to the search instituted in consequence of it, is admissible.'

It is the State's contention in this case that there is sufficient evidence that the plaintiff in error drove his car on the streets of Memphis while under the influence of an intoxicant. The facts show when the police arrived that plaintiff in error's car was parked out in the middle of the street, as said above, and the plaintiff in error was standing at the rear of the car, and, under the uncontradicted proof herein, was under the influence of an intoxicant. The automobile was that of the plaintiff in error and had been left in the center of one of the main thoroughfares of a...