Raines v. State, 37051

• Decision Date: 21 April 1981
• Docket Number: No. 37051,37051
• Citation: 247 Ga. 504,277 S.E.2d 47
• Parties: Enoch RAINES v. The STATE.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

Page 47

277 S.E.2d 47

247 Ga. 504

Enoch RAINES v. The STATE.

No. 37051.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

April 21, 1981.

Robert E. Baynard, Baynard & Zeese, Albany, for Enoch Raines.

William S. Lee, Dist. Atty., J. Brown Moseley, Asst. Dist. Atty., Albany, Arthur K. Bolton, Atty. Gen., Atlanta, for the State.

PER CURIAM.

Enoch Raines was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to life imprisonment. He brings this appeal enumerating as error the trial court's failure to give his requested charges on voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.

The defendant, Enoch Raines, lost the use of his legs in 1961 in a car accident which left him paralyzed from the waist down. In 1971, he married the victim. She had one child, whom he adopted. His wife, Bertha Mae Raines, bore twins in 1978, but the defendant testified that although he was not their natural father he had "adopted" them. Also in 1978 the defendant's legs were amputated. As a result of the amputation he customarily wore a device called a "bucket" to give him stability. ¹ On the night he shot and wounded his wife, he was not wearing the bucket on instruction of a plastic surgeon who had recently performed some skin grafts.

The defendant testified that he awoke in the early morning hours of December 21, 1979, when he thought he heard a noise outside. Since there had been some "incidents" in the neighborhood, he walked on his hands to the back door to check outside, taking his gun (a double action revolver) from under the mattress. ² Seeing nothing, he closed the back door. On his way back to the bedroom he stopped and got a cigarette from his wife's pocketbook, where he found a letter addressed to her boyfriend. He took the letter back to the bedroom and asked his wife "what it was all about." According to Raines, "She started laughing and calling me all kinds of names." Raines testified that his wife called him "half a man" and "said that I wasn't no good, that I couldn't have sex relationships with her the way other men do," laughing all the while. He insisted, however, that he was not angry but only disappointed and hurt. He said he had no reaction to finding the letter since he had known his wife went with other men since 1974 and that although he didn't approve of it he had learned to accept it. He maintained that the shooting was entirely accidental, that he was balancing himself by having propped his arm up against a low table bearing a lamp and that as he started toward the bed to lay down his arm slipped, he fell, and the gun fired twice. ³

Raines then called the police and said he had shot his wife and he needed an ambulance and a police officer. The ambulance arrived first. One attendant testified that he heard Raines say that he was angry with his wife, they were fussing, and he shot her. The other attendant testified that Raines told him he had gotten into an argument with his wife and shot her. He also testified that Raines did not appear to be angry but was very upset. The first police officer to arrive testified that Raines told him "It was my fault and the gun went off." He apparently did not mention any argument.

The ambulance attendants took both the victim and the defendant to the hospital for treatment. The defendant was taken in for treatment because he was bleeding from the lower part of his body. While in the emergency room, the defendant was interrogated by a police officer. The officer testified that except for one outburst of apparent anger when the defendant grabbed the rails on his bed and shook them, he appeared to be excited and nervous but not angry. The defendant seemed not to hear the detective but made a number of spontaneous statements, among them, "I raised up and fell over and the gun went off." An officer who spoke with the victim shortly after she arrived at the hospital testified: "I asked her what happened and she stated that she and her husband had been drinking and smoking dope and that they got into an argument and that he had shot her." The victim died as a result of her wounds after six days in the hospital.

The defendant admitted having fired his gun during an argument with his wife on a previous occasion.

The defendant made written requests that the trial court instruct the jury as to voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The trial judge refused those requests. The jury was charged as to murder and accident and found the defendant guilty of murder. Defendant appeals, enumerating error upon the refusal of his requests to charge.

1. Code Ann. § 26-1102 provides that "A person commits voluntary manslaughter when he causes the death of another human being, under circumstances which would otherwise be murder, if he acts solely as the result of a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient to excite such passion in a reasonable person...." According to the defendant's testimony his wife was carrying a letter she had written to her boyfriend and upon her husband's discovery of it not only admitted her adultery but taunted him with it as well as with degrading comments about his disability. The evidence here shows sufficient "serious provocation" to authorize a charge on voluntary manslaughter. Campbell v. State, 204 Ga. 399, 403, 49 S.E.2d 867 (1948); Burger v. State, 238 Ga. 171(1), 231 S.E.2d 769 (1977); Vick v. State, 116 Ga.App. 25(3), 156 S.E.2d 125 (1967). Yet the state argues that the trial court correctly refused to give the requested charge because the defendant claimed accident and repeatedly denied having been provoked by his wife's actions. Nevertheless, we find that the defendant was entitled to a charge on voluntary manslaughter. As we stated in Henderson v. State, 234 Ga. 827, 831-32, 218 S.E.2d 612 (1975), "Although the appellant's testimony may have excluded voluntary manslaughter as a possible verdict, the evidence as a whole did not. 'On the trial of a murder case, if there be any evidence, however slight, as to whether the offense is murder of voluntary manslaughter, instruction as to the law of both offenses should be given the jury.' "

2. The defendant also claims that the trial court erred in refusing to give a requested charge on involuntary manslaughter. He contends the trial court erred in not charging both subsections (a) and (b) of Code Ann. § 26-1103. We note at the outset that since defendant claims accident and does not claim self-defense, ...