People v. Sullivan
| Decision Date | 08 October 1931 |
| Docket Number | No. 20712.,20712. |
| Citation | 177 N.E. 733,345 Ill. 87 |
| Parties | PEOPLE v. SULLIVAN et al. |
| Court | Illinois Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Error to Criminal Court, Cook County; Joseph Sabath, Judge.
Richard Sullivan and another were convicted of murder, and they bring error.
Affirmed.Benjamin C. Bachrach, Wilbert F. Crowley, and Wendell E. Green, all of Chicago, for plaintiff in error Bell.
David Riskind and Herbert Geisler, both of Chicago, for plaintiff in error Sullivan.
Oscar E. Carlstrom, Atty. Gen., John A. Swanson, State's Atty., of Chicago, and J. J. Neiger, of Rock Island (Edward E. Wilson and Grenville Beardsley, both of Chicago, of counsel), for the People.
Richard Sullivan and Frank Bell were convicted in the criminal court of Cook county of murder, were sentenced to death, and have sued out a writ of error.
The crime was committed a few minutes after 2 o'clock in the morning of June 16, 1930. The place was the Villa Rica Restaurant, at the southwest corner of Wrightwood avenue and Clark street, in the city of Chicago, of which Christ Patras was the manager. He was shot there by both of the defendants acting together, receiving four gunshot wounds in his body, from which he died. A diagram of the room appears in the record, but a detailed description of it is not necessary. The width of the room fronted east on Clark street and its length extended back west on Wrightwood avenue. The entrance was at the northeast corner through a door placed diagonally so as to front on both Clark street and Wrightwood avenue. On the south side of the room was a lunch counter, between which and the south wall was an aisle used by the employees serving at the lunch counter, a cigar case and cash register, and south of the aisle were coffee urns, an ice box, and a pie showcase. The lunch counter was divided into two sections, the shorter at the west end having seven stools in front and the longer one at the east, nine. The lunch counter did not reach to the east wall of the room buy stopped a few feet short. A cigar case occupied the space east of the lunch counter to the wall, except a narrow space or aisle between the west end of the case and the east end of the lunch counter. In the southeast corner of the room, south of the cigar case, was a cigarette case, and west of it a radio, which was next to the pie showcase, south of and across the aisle from the lunch counter. There was a safe behind the cigar case, under the radio or cigarette case, and under the lunch counter were shelves accessible to the service aisle, on one of which, opposite the first counter stool, was a loaded 45-caliber revolver. The aisle continued to the east end of the room, having the radio and the cigarette case south of it, the cigar case north of it and connecting with the aisle between the cigar case and the lunch counter.
The two defendants came into the restaurant about 2 o'clock in the morning, occupied the first two stools at the east end of the lunch counter, and ordered coffee. Then they ordered a second cup. When they came in Patras was sitting in a booth further back in the room with his wife. Presently he arose and went back to the kitchen to get her some food. A few minutes later he came out of the kitchen and walked east back of the lunch counter toward the cigar case and the cash register, which stood on it. As he walked toward the cigar case the two men got up off the stools near the cigar case as though about to pay their checks. One of them went behind the counter and met Patras walking toward him, facing east. Patras stooped, and as he rose both he and the other man were firing. Patras shot only once. The bullet passed through the sliding door of the cigar case and was found lying in that case. He had used the revolver lying under the lunch counter and the bullet probably hit Sullivan in the hip before it passed through the sliding door of the cigar case, as Sullivan had such a wound when he was arrested on July 22. Several other shots were fired in rapid succession. Bell ran out of the door and Sullivan came from the cigar counter with a revolver in his hand, which he was waving. He backed out with the revolver in his hand until he reached the vestibule and then he disappeared. Patras was lying behind the cigar case on his face, with his head to the east. A post mortem examination disclosed four bullet wounds, apparently made by bullets of .38 caliber. One had entered the left side of the neck just back of the jawbone and emerged on the right side just below the jaw. Another entered the left chest, just over the fifth rib, passed through the lung, and emerged just below the shoulder blade. The third entered the middle portion of the left arm, passed through the arm and shoulder, and emerged on the inner side at about the same level. The fourth was a grazing superficial wound across the left breast. Death was due to hemorrhage from the gunshot wound of the heart. The course of the bullets indicated that the bullet which resulted in death came from in front of Patras and two other bullets came from his left side. The bullet which came from the left the passed through his neck must have resulted in his disablement. The course of the bullets shows that besides the revolver of Patras two others were in use, one fired from in front of Patras, from which the bullet was fired which caused the fatal wound, and the other from his left side, bullets from which struck him in the neck and the left arm and also struck the dial of the radio. The men engaged were the two men who had sat on the two stools at the Clark street end of the lunch counter, one of whom went behind the counter and was in front of Patras, and the other was to the left of Patras across the counter. The evidence left by the bullets showed beyond any doubt that both men engaged in the shooting.
Sullivan was positively identified by Cecelia Patras, the widow, and by Elda Hubrick. The identification of Bell by the witnesses was not positive, but after his arrest he made a voluntary statement wherein he said that he was one of the men. In this statement he attributed all the shooting at Patras to Sullivan, and explained the purpose of his presence and Sullivan's at the restaurant to be the division of $10,000 which Patras had and which was to be divided, $1,000 to Bell, $3,000 to one Traum, $3,000 to Traum's pal, and $3,000 to Sullivan, for their part in some other crime. When the statement was read to the jury, the words ‘the other man’ were substituted for ‘Sullivan,’ so that the jury might not receive the statement as evidence against Sullivan. In the statement, also, Bell said that Traum did not go into the restaurant but waited outside in the automobile and kept its engine going. The testimony of John Lane, who had eaten at the lunch counter and had left a very short time before the shooting, and who after the shooting saw the two men run from the restaurant and enter a parked automobile, tends strongly to show that the engine of the car was not running and that one of the men got into the driver's seat and used the starter to start the car. Verne Adams had also eaten at the counter and left the restaurant only a few minutes before the murder, and he, too, saw the men run to the parked car; but neither he nor Lane was able to identify the two men who were seated at the east end of the counter or the men who ran to the car after the shooting. The self-serving statements, partly shown to be false, made by Bell in his statement do not weaken in any degree his statement that he was one of the two men present when Patras was killed or the force of the circumstantial evidence of the course of the bullets then fired. The evidence thus showed without any doubt that both Bell and Sullivan were engaged in the shooting which resulted in Patras' death. Neither testified upon the trial and they offered no evidence. It thus appeared, without explanation of the circumstances, that Bell and Sullivan shot Patras, who died as the result of a wound then inflicted. Patras was in his usual place of business. One of the men was out of the place reserved for customers. He was nearer the safe than was Patras. The safe door was open immediately after the shooting. The circumstances indicated that Bell and Sullivan were engaged in a holdup, during the course of which Patras resisted and they killed him. Apart from any other cumulative evidence in the case, the jury could have done no less than find the defendants guilty of murder.
The defendants were represented in the trial, and are represented here, by different counsel and have filed separate briefs. The objection is made by Bell that all of the evidence fails to establish his guilt, but the evidence to which we have referred is uncontroverted, and, as we have seen, it does establish his guilt so thoroughly that no error which may have occurred on the trial could have affected him injuriously unless its logical tendency were to cause the jury to impose a more severe penalty than they might have done except for the error.
Bell was arrested on June 30, 1930, by Howard J. Doyle, a police officer, in company with other police officers, at 1214 North Paulinia street. A revolver was found near him in the room where he was arrested, which he admitted belonged to him. The court permittedthe people to show the circumstances of the arrest, and the revolver was admitted in evidence over his objection upon the undertaking of the state's attorney to connect it with the crime. Doyle testified that Bell was lying on a davenport on which two women were sitting. He was searched, as well as the room, and a .38-caliber blue-steel Colt pistol was found behind a cushion of the davenport, within arm's reach of Bell. At the detective bureau, about fifteen or twenty minutes later, Bell, in answer to a question, said that the pistol was his. The people failed to show that the pistol had been used in the killing of Patras, though an...
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