People v. Beckwith

• Decision Date: 26 October 1886
• Parties: PEOPLE v. BECKWITH.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

103 N.Y. 361

8 N.E. 662

PEOPLE

v.BECKWITH.

Court of Appeals of New York.

October 26, 1886.

Appeal from a court of oyer and terminer, held in Hudson city, in and for the county of Columbia. Indictment for murder in the first degree. Verdict of guilty. Motion by defendant for a new trial denied. Defendant appeals.

L. F. Longley, for appellant, Beckwith.

A. B. Gardinier, for the People.

FINCH, J.

That the prisoner killed the deceased by the blow of an axe he himself has testified. While the jury were not bound to believe his account of the struggle, and its origin, and might well have doubted it, as in many respects improbable and unreasonable, yet, if they gave it credence, it furnished, in connection with the other evidence, sufficient ground for the verdict which they rendered.

The argument before us was largely devoted to the point, that the final blow was delivered at the close of a furious struggle, and before sufficient time had elapsed for the prisoner's passions, engendered by the conflict, to subside and cool; and so the crime was manslaughter only. But that grade of homicideis marked by the important characteristic that there is no design to kill. If such purpose is present, the offense is murder in one of its degrees. The evidence very clearly shows the existence of that design. Granting all that the prisoner says of the struggle, yet it is apparent that while the blow of the knife might have been given in the heat of the affray, and without a purpose to kill, the blow of the axe admits of no such explanation. That was struck when the struggle had ended, and the victim lay paralyzed and unresisting. The knife had penetrated the lung, and weakened him perceptibly, and the prisoner had choked him until, to use his own expression, he was ‘about past recall;’ and then, with no danger remaining, his own personal safety assured, and abundant opportunity to escape from the cabin without injury, or hand the assailant over to justice, he nevertheless ‘let go’ of his antagonist, rendered helpless and harmless, went after and obtained his axe, and with it ended the life not yet destroyed by the blow of the knife and the choking which followed. The weapon was selected and the blow was struck with a palpable design to effect death. No other inference is reasonable. If we assume-what the evidence does not show, and the prisoner does not say or pretend-that the axe was near at hand, and easily and swiftly grasped, and the knife had been dropped in the struggle, which also is wholly unproved, it is still true that the conflict was at an end; and the prisoner himself says: ‘I let him go; I was afraid I had killed him.’ That was a natural fear, and the presence of such an emotion-the shock of discovering that he had endangered the life of his adversary-is quite inconsistent with the continuance of frenzy and rage. The passion of the fight was probably replaced by the fear of consequences naturally born of the condition of the deceased. Scarcely anything would cool the prisoner's anger more swiftly than the sight of the dying man on the floor, and the consciousness of having, perhaps, killed him; for one strong emotion drives out another. That fear of consequences, he tells us, came into his mind, and following it seems to have arisen an evident purpose to evade those consequences by making sure of the death of his enemy, and proceeding to mutilate and destroy the body with a view to escape detection. And so the axe was wielded with a settled design to kill.

There was some degree, also, of premeditation and deliberation. The process of reasoning which the prisoner's own words suggest shows that he deliberated. He reflected enough to be conscious that his victim was in danger of death; enough to feel an emotion of fear for the consequences to himself; enough to decide that it was safer to finally kill him than run the risk of his recovery, or his death, lingering and discovered; enough to select and choose the axe as the surest weapon, instead of the knife, which he had already used; and then, having inflicted death, to proceed coolly to the logical end of his deliberation by burning so much of the body as could be identified, by taking from the...