Mcneil v. State
| Decision Date | 26 February 1932 |
| Parties | McNEIL v. STATE. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
Error to Criminal Court of Record, Dade County; E. C. Collins Judge.
Odie McNeil was convicted of armed robbery, and he brings error.
Judgment reversed, and a new trial ordered.
COUNSEL George M. Okell, of Miami, for plaintiff in error.
Cary D Landis, Atty. Gen., and Roy Campbell, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.
Robert Reese, P. Baldwin, and Odie McNeil were jointly informed against in the criminal court of record of Dade county for the offense of armed robbery, as denounced and punished by chapter 13792, Acts of 1929, Laws of Florida section 7157, Comp. Gen. Laws, section 5055, Rev. Gen. St as amended.
Robert Reese and Odie McNeil were found guilty, while P. Baldwin was acquitted. From a sentence to life imprisonment imposed on him by the court, Odie McNeil, one of the convicted defendants, took writ of error to this court.
The judgment against Odie McNeil must be reversed on the authority of Nims v. State, 70 Fla. 530, 70 So. 565; Platt v. State, 65 Fla. 253, 61 So. 502; Newborn v. State, 73 Fla. 1064, 75 So. 581; Heath v. State, 97 Fla. 330, 120 So. 846; Parish v. State, 98 Fla. 877, 124 So. 444, 445.
Human liberty should not be forfeited by a conviction under evidence which is not sufficient to convince a fair and impartial mind of the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. This is especially true in a case where life imprisonment is the penalty imposed. Heath v. State, supra. And where the evidence of identity of the accused as being the guilty party is not satisfactory to the appellate court, a new trial will be granted. Nims v. State, supra.
In this case the sole testimony identifying the defendant McNeil as a participant in the robbery was given by the witness Rahming, whose identification of the defendant P. Baldwin, which was of equal force, was rejected by the jury which found Baldwin not guilty on the same identification on which it convicted McNeil.
While the weight of the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses is ordinarily a matter which is exclusively within the province of the jury to decide, and this court will as a rule not reverse a judgment based upon a verdict returned by the jury and approved by the trial judge, when there is substantial evidence to support the verdict rendered, it is also the rule that the evidence...
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Tibbs v. Florida
...a fair and impartial mind of the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt.' " 337 So.2d, at 791 (quoting McNeil v. State, 104 Fla. 360, 361-362, 139 So. 791, 792 (1932)). This reference, however, occurs in a lengthy quotation from an earlier Florida decision. When read in context, it ......
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Tibbs v. State
...on the state's failure to place the defendants at the scene of the crime or to prove that they fired the fatal shots. McNeil v. State, 104 Fla. 360, 139 So. 791 (1932), and Woodward v. State, 113 Fla. 301, 151 So. 509 (1933), are similar to Williams. In McNeil this court reversed because "t......
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