People v. Logan
| Decision Date | 24 October 1934 |
| Docket Number | No. 22563.,22563. |
| Citation | 192 N.E. 675,358 Ill. 64 |
| Parties | PEOPLE v. LOGAN et al. |
| Court | Illinois Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Robert Logan and another were convicted of robbery, and they appeal.
Reversed.
Appeal from Criminal Court, Cook County; Walter P. Steffen, judge.
Emmet F. Byrne, of Chicago (Clyde C. Fisher, of Chicago, of counsel), for appellants.
Otto Kerner, Atty. Gen., Thomas J. Courtney, State's Atty., of Chicago, and J. J. Neiger, of Springfield (Edward E. Wilson, J. Albert Woll, and Henry E. Seyfarth, all of Chicago, of counsel), for the People.
The appellants, Robert Logan and Salvatore Sortino, alias Sam Sartino, were indicted in the criminal court of Cook county. They were charged with robbery of one Thelma Carison on October 9, 1933. One count charged the aggravated crime of robbery while armed with a gun. The first count also charged that on a prior occasion Sortino had been convicted of larceny from the person and that he had been sentenced to the reformatory at Pontiac. The appellants pleaded not guilty and were tried before a jury. At the close of the state's case, and again at the close of all the evidence, both appellants presented their motions to direct the jury to find them not guilty and submitted instructions to that effect. These motions were overruled. The appellants were found guilty. Motions for a new trial and in arrest of judgment followed. These motions were also overruled, and this appeal followed.
The appellant Salvatore Sortino contends that the verdict and judgment of conviction against him are contrary to law. It was stipulated that this appellant was indicted for robbery at the March, 1925, term of the criminal court of Cook county; that he was duly arraigned and pleaded guilty to larceny from the person; and that ‘on his plea of guilty to larceny from the person was * * * sentenced to Pontiac Reformatory.’ The contention is that there was a total failure of proof, because in the case now before us, in the first count of the indictment, this appellant was charged with having been formerly indicted for the crime of larceny from the person instead of the crime of robbery as stated in the stipulation, and further because the stipulation and the record both fail to show that the consequences of a plea of guilty were fully explained to Sortino at the time he entered his plea of guilty.
Section 246 of the Criminal Code (Smith-Hurd Ann. St. c. 38, § 501) says: ‘Robbery is the felonious and violent taking of money, goods or other valuable thing, from the person of another by force or intimidation.’ Section 389 of chapter 38 provides: ‘Every person convicted of larceny if the property stolen exceeds the value of fifteen dollars, or if the property is stolen from the person of another, shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary,’ etc. Section 602 of the same chapter provides: ‘That whenever any person having been convicted of either of the crimes of burgiary, grand larceny, horse-stealing, robbery, * * * shall thereafter be convicted of any one of such crimes, committed after such first conviction, the punishment shall be imprisonment in the penitentiary for the full term provided by law for such crime,’ etc.
Robbery involves a stealing from the person, and stealing from the person of another is grand larceny under paragrpah 389, and is covered specifically by paragraph 602, known as the Habitual Criminal Act.
It was not necessary for the stipulation to contain all of the steps in detail leading up to the return of the indictment or to the plea of guilty and judgment of conviction admitted in the stipulation. The judgment of conviction was entered against Sortino on his plea of guilty. That judgment will be presumed to have remained in force unquestioned and unreversed, since no proof was offered to the contrary. It is the judgment of conviction-not the plea of guilty-that forms the basis for the application of the Habitual Criminal Act in the present prosecution. The situation is entirely different from that presented where the former conviction must be proved and is not stipulated.
It is contended that the court erred in giving the fourth instruction asked on behalf of the people. This instruction defined an accessory. The appellants contend that it should not have been given...
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