Leiber v. Commonwealth
| Citation | 72 Ky. 11 |
| Parties | Leiber v. Commonwealth. |
| Decision Date | 28 June 1872 |
| Court | Court of Appeals of Kentucky |
APPEAL FROM JEFFERSON CIRCUIT COURT.
THOS. E. BRAMLETTE, SELBY HARNEY, W. L. JACKSON, For Appellant.
JOHN RODMAN, Attorney-General, For Appellee.
This appeal is prosecuted for the reversal of a judgment and sentence of death rendered upon a verdict convicting the appellant on an indictment for the murder of Charles Goennewein.
In the argument for the appellant the correctness of the action of the circuit court is questioned both as to its rulings in relation to the admissibility of evidence and upon various propositions to instruct the jury. The first question thus presented for the determination of this court, and, as we conceive, the most important one which it will be necessary to decide, is as to the competency of certain statements which were made by Goennewein shortly before his death, and which were proved and admitted as evidence, notwithstanding the objections of the defendant, as the dying declarations of the deceased, to be considered by the jury together with other evidence conducing to sustain the charge in the indictment. Those declarations not only conduced to identify the defendant as the perpetrator of the alleged homicide, and to establish and explain the circumstances of the res gestæ, but also purported to disclose former and distinct transactions not relating to the particular facts constituting the subject-matter of the charge or the identification of the defendant, but from which the jury might have inferred the existence of malice on the part of the appellant toward the deceased. And the essential inquiry involved, and on which the correctness of the ruling of the court under consideration seems solely to depend, is whether the court did or not err in admitting so much of the dying statements of the deceased as did not relate to and were not necessary to establish the circumstances or direct transactions from which his death resulted, and to identify and connect the defendant with him.
On this question there is some contrariety of adjudication; but the decided weight of authority on the subject seems to be to the effect that it is a general rule that dying declarations, although made with a full consciousness of approaching death, are only admissible in evidence where the death of the deceased is the subject of the charge, and the circumstances of the death the subject of the dying declaration....
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