Shaffer v. State

• Decision Date: 20 June 1918
• Docket Number: 6 Div. 698
• Citation: 80 So. 81,202 Ala. 243
• Parties: SHAFFER v. STATE.
• Court: Alabama Supreme Court

80 So. 81

202 Ala. 243

SHAFFER v. STATE.

6 Div. 698

Supreme Court of Alabama

June 20, 1918

Rehearing Denied Nov. 11, 1918

Appeal from Circuit Court, Jefferson County; Wm. E. Fort, Judge.

Earl Shaffer was convicted of murder, and he appeals. Affirmed.

T.A Murphree, of Birmingham, for appellant.

F. Loyd Tare, Atty. Gen., and Emmett S. Thigpen, Asst. Atty. Gen for the State.

MAYFIELD J.

Appellant was indicted and convicted of the murder of one Arthur Chandler by cutting him with a knife, and from the judgment of conviction and sentence of death, he prosecutes this appeal.

After a careful examination of the transcript, we find in the record proper no error which would work a reversal. The minute entries all appear to conform to the statutory requirements as to such entries in capital cases. We have as the statute directs searched the record for reversible errors, but find none, though counsel for defendant have filed an appealing and able brief for the defendant.

The trial court is shown to have charged the law fully and correctly, as applied to the evidence in this particular case. If the charges, oral or written, be subject to any criticism, it is that they were more favorable to the defendant than he had a right to demand, when applied to the evidence in the case.

The evidence was practically without dispute that defendant and deceased were both convicts, and, as such, were confined and being worked as prisoners in a coal mine, and that defendant killed deceased by cutting him with a knife. If some of the evidence be true, the killing was, under the law, an unprovoked, deliberate, and premeditated murder. This being true, the defendant was not entitled to any of the requested charges, which were, in effect, affirmative charges to acquit of some one or more degrees of murder.

The other requested charges refused to the defendant were each and all correctly refused, when referred to the evidence in this case. It is useless to treat them severally. Each belonged to a class or kind which has been declared to be properly refused, in trials like this, many times; some because they stressed, and confined the jury to a consideration of, a part only of the evidence; others because they were arguments of counsel; and still others because they were palpably bad for other reasons. It is true, as argued by counsel for appellant, that charge 20, refused to defendant has been several times held good by this court, and as late as Roberson's Case, 175 Ala. 15, 57 So. 829. In a later case, however, that of Ex parte Davis, 184 Ala. 26, 63 So 1010, the decisions as to this charge were reviewed, and those holding it good, and that it is error to refuse it, were overruled. Charges were given, however, at the request of the defendant, which asserted the same proposition of law asserted in this charge, though not in the exact language. We repeat, the record shows that the law of the case was fully, correctly, and fairly given to the jury by the trial court.

There was no error in any of the given requested charges. There was no error in allowing the witness to describe the scene of the killing, together with the blood stains and other evidences of the mode of the homicide, nor error in allowing a witness to testify that, to his best judgment, a certain knife found near the place of the killing, or...