Parsons v. People

• Decision Date: 20 December 1905
• Citation: 75 N.E. 993,218 Ill. 386
• Parties: PARSONS v. PEOPLE.
• Court: Illinois Supreme Court

218 Ill. 386

75 N.E. 993

PARSONS

v.PEOPLE.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

Dec. 20, 1905.

Error to Circuit Court, St. Clair County; B. R. Burroughs, Judge.

Samuel Parsons was convicted of murder, and brings error. Affirmed.Webb & Webb and George A. Crow, for plaintiff in error.

W. H. Stead, Atty. Gen., for the People.

On October 6, 1903, plaintiff in error was indicted by the grand Jury of St. Clair county for the murder of his wife, Virginia Parsons, by shooting her with a pistol on the 21st day of July, 1903, at their home in the city of East St. Louis. To the indictment a plea of not guilty was entered. The defendant was put upon his trial, and on November 14, 1903, the jury returned a verdict, finding the plaintiff in error guilty, and fixing his punishment at imprisonment in the penitentiary for the term of his natural life. A motion for a new trial was made and overruled, and judgment was thereupon entered upon the verdict and sentence passed against the plaintiff in error. Plaintiff in error was married to the deceased, then Virginia Bonner, at Little Rock, Ark., on October 30, 1897. Plaintiff in error appears to have been brought up on a farm in Texas, and before his marriage was a railroad man. For some time after his marriage he lived in Little Rock, and was engaged as an underwriter for an investment company. From Little Rock he went to Mt. Pleasant, Tex., where he was engaged in railroad work for the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway Company, and lived there for about a year. From there he went to Mississippi, and worked for a railway company; and in 1900, after living at Greenville, he went to Water Valley, Miss. During this time he and his wife lived together, though they appear to have been occasionally separated. Plaintiff in error and his wife came from Paducah, Ky., where her mother lived, to East St. Louis, some time after Christmas, 1902. Prior to that his wife had left him, and gone back to Paducah to her mother. They had one child, a little girl about four years old. Upon arriving at East St. Louis, they rented a couple of rooms where they lived for a few weeks. Then they went to live at a boarding house, where they stayed until some time in June, and then went to the house, known as 819 Winstanley avenue, where they lived when the shooting took place in the next month. Plaintiff in error's occupation when working for the railroad was that of a switchman. The evidence tends to show numerous quarrels between plaintiff in error and his wife, and that he several times left her. On July 21, 1903, plaintiff in error had charge of a gambling game, called a ‘crap game,’ in a saloon in East St. Louis, run by a man named Jones. On the night of that day, July 20, 1903, plaintiff in error went home, arriving there about 10 o'clock or a little after. The door was locked, and his wife let him in. A Mrs. Goldman or Coleman was boarding with them, and she and Mrs. Parsons had not retired for the night, but had let down the windows and closed and locked the doors. The house where they lived consisted of four rooms, the first of which is designated in the testimony as the ‘front room;’ the next room was the sleeping room, in which there was a bed, and which was occupied by plaintiff in error and his wife as a bedroom, and called in the testimony the ‘middle room.’ He and his wife and little girl slept in the bed in the middle room. There was a door leading from the front room into the bedroom or middle room. There was also a door leading from the porch into the front room, and to the right of this door was a window looking out upon the porch. There was also a window on the left side of the front room. The bed was placed diagonally across the middle room, the head being towards the right corner, and the foot towards the left corner.

The plaintiff in error claims that he went to bed, and went to sleep, and was awakened in the middle of the night, about midnight or shortly thereafter, and heard a noise in the front room. He states that he mistook his wife for a burglar, and shot her. His version of the shooting is that he had been sleeping about an hour and a half when he was suddenly wakened by a noise; that when he heard the noise, he raised up, but was not wide awake at that time, but dazed; that when he heard the noise he shot immediately just as he straightened up; that he turned and raised up, sitting in bed, and shot; that he hadn't his eyes open; that he could not see anything as it was dark. According to his statement, he shot through the door opening from the front room into the bedroom, and struck his wife, who appears to have been near the window of the left wall of the front room. A Mrs. Berry lived next door to plaintiff in error and his wife at 817 Winstanley avenue. She was on her front porch attending to a sick child in a hammock, and heard the firing of a revolver. She went into the house, and asked what had happened, and Parsons told her that he had shot his wife for a burglar. She says that Mrs. Parsons was lying where she was shot, under the side window of the front room next to Mrs. Berry's house, near to the window, but that her head was out about three feet from the window; that the window was up, and the screen was lying on the floor near the window where she had been shot; that the shot was fired at about 12:30 o'clock; that, when she got to where Mrs. Parsons was lying, Mrs. Parsons siad: ‘You have killed me; get mother.’ Mrs. Berry states that Parsons came home about 10:30 that night, while she was on the porch with a sick child, and was talking loud; that she could hear more or less of what was said; that they were quarreling over the fact that Mrs. Parsons had purchased some rugs, and had given $9.50 for them; that she heard Parsons say: ‘I know over the river, I can get all the rugs I can carry for $2.50 a piece, and I won't pay no such prices, and you'll have to take them back;’ that they spoke unusually loud; that she heard Mrs. Parsons say that she would just as leave pay the money for the rugs, as to pay it for ‘whisky, whoring, and gambling’; that they quarreled for about a half an hour and then were quiet, and then she heard nothing more, until she heard the report of the revolver, and heard Mrs. Parsons scream; that she ran down to the corner of the house and called out: ‘What is the matter? What is the matter?’ three or four times; that she did not get an answer right away, but finally Parsons came out of the door and said: ‘I have shot my wife; for God's sake get some one to get a doctor.’ The deceased lived until about 6 o'clock in the morning when she died. During the time while Mrs. Parsons lived the defendant did what he could to alleviate her pains, and frequently expressed his sorrow, giving vent to his feelings by the shedding of tears.

MAGRUDER, J. (after stating the facts).

It is admitted that the plaintiff in error killed his wife. The only question is whether or not his statement is true that he killed her accidentally, mistaking her for a burglar, or whether he willfully murdered her. He states that when he reached home, she told him that a burglar had tried to make an entry into the house, and that there had been previously thereto one or more attempts to enter the house. Section 155 of chapter 38 of the Revised Statutes, being the Criminal Code, is as follows: ‘The killing being proved, the burden of proving circumstances of mitigation, or that justify or excuse the homicide, will devolve on the accused, unless the proof on the part of the prosecution sufficiently manifests that the crime committed only amounts to manslaughter, or that the accused was justified or excused in committing the homicide.’ Hurd's Rev. St. 1899, p. 596.

Whether the homicide was justified or excusable for the reasons stated by the plaintiff in error was a question of fact for the determination of the jury. In Steffy v. People, 130 Ill. 98, 22 N. E. 861, which was an indictment for an assault with intent to murder, we said (page 99 of 130 Ill.,page 861 of 22 N. E.): ‘Whether the evidence warranted the verdict was a question of fact peculiarly within the province of the jury to determine, and great weight is to be given to their finding. Courts are reluctant to substitute their opinion for that of the jury upon controverted questions of fact. To justify this court in reversing, on the ground that the evidence was insufficient, it must appear that the finding of the jury is not sustained by the evidence, or that it is palpably contrary to the decided weight of the evidence.’ Gainey v. People, 97 Ill. 270, 37 Am. Rep. 109;McCoy v. People, 175 Ill. 224, 51 N. E. 777;Gilman v. People, 178 Ill. 26, 52 N. E. 967;Johnson v. People, 202 Ill. 53, 66 N. E. 877. In McCoy v. People, supra, which was an indictment for murder, it was said (page 229 of 175 Ill.,page 779 of 51 N. E.): ‘Plaintiff in error insists that the evidence is not sufficient to sustain a conviction. The law has placed the determination of that question with the jury, and it is only when this court is satisfied, from a careful consideration of the whole testimony, that there is a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused, that it will interfere with the verdict of the jury on the ground that the evidence does not support the verdict.’ We are unable to say, in the case at bar, that the evidence does not sustain the verdict of the jury.

There was much in the conduct of the plaintiff in error after the killing of his wife, which tended to confirm his statement in regard to it. But there was also much in the evidence to contradict the truthfulness of his statement. In the first place, the evidence showed that the plaintiff in error and his wife, both before they came to East St. Louis and after they came there, lived an unhappy life, and quarreled much with each other, and separated several times from each other. One witness, who was a next door neighbor when they lived in Water Valley, Miss.,...