State v. Cohen
Citation | 78 N.W. 857,108 Iowa 208 |
Parties | STATE v. COHEN. |
Decision Date | 08 April 1899 |
Court | United States State Supreme Court of Iowa |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Appeal from district court, Blackhawk county; A. S. Blair, Judge.
From a judgment convicting him of the crime of arson, the defendant appeals. Reversed.Mullan & Pickett, for appellant.
Milton Remley, Atty. Gen., and S. B. Reed, for the State.
The evidence was wholly circumstantial. The court, as the eleventh paragraph of the charge, gave this instruction: What the court doubtless intended to say was that it was not incumbent on the state to prove beyond reasonable doubt every circumstance offered in evidence, and tending to establish facts essential to a conviction. If so intended, it would have been a correct statement of the law. And we may go further, and say that it is not necessary that each essential fact in the chain of circumstances solely relied on to connect the accused with the commission of the offense, when separately considered, be found beyond reasonable doubt. Such a fact, though having little to sustain it when standing alone, may derive such support from others immediately connected therewith as to exclude all doubt of its existence. Nevertheless, if conviction depends entirely on different circumstances, arranged linkwise, connecting the defendant with the crime charged, then each and every one of these must be established beyond a reasonable doubt; for no chain can be stronger than its weakest link. Com. v. Webster, 5 Cush. 295; People v. Phipps, 39 Cal. 333;Crow v. State. 33 Tex. Cr. R. 264, 26 S. W. 209; 2 Thomp. Trials, 2511; Rice, Ev. p. 766; People v. Aikin (Mich.) 33 N. W. 821;Kollock v. State (Wis.) 60 N. W. 817. Not so, however, with the minor circumstances relied on by the state to establish the ultimate and essential facts upon which conviction depends. Some of these may fail of proof, and yet those essential to conviction be found from other evidence beyond reasonable doubt. But the linked arrangement of fact to fact, in cases of circumstantial evidence, is not always discernible. A guilty person is quite as frequently hemmed in by a throng of circumstances. As said in Leonard v. Territory (Wash.) 7 Pac. 878: “Release from a chain comes when the weakest link gives away, but escape from a crowd does not necessarily depend on the presence or absence of one or another, or even, perhaps, the greatest number, of the individuals composing it.” If the jury could only have understood, from the phrase “link in the chain of circumstances,” that such fact or circumstance was referred to as might tend to establish the ultimate facts and circumstances upon which conviction depended, then, though not approving of the use of metaphors in instructions, an exception would not be well founded. But the connection in which it was used does not require that construction, and we deem it the more likely to have been thought by the jury to refer to facts or circumstances essential to conviction, and which, according to all the authorities and sound reasoning, must be established beyond reasonable doubt. This instruction has been repeatedly condemned as erroneous by other courts. State v. Furney (Kan. Sup.) 21 Pac. 216;State v. Gleim (Mont.) 41 Pac. 998;Marion v. State (Neb.) 20 N. W. 294;Graves v. People (Colo. Sup.) 32 Pac. 66; Leonard v. Territory, supra; People v. Aikin, supra; Clair v People (Colo. Sup.) 10 Pac. 799. The reasoning in the last case is so concisely and perspicuously stated, that we quote with approval: The supreme court of Illinois seem to approve the instruction in Bressler v. People, 3 N. E. 522; but, when again before that court in the same case (8 N. E. 62), it was pronounced inaccurate, but held to have done no harm. The charge was larceny of a note from a justice of the peace named Smith. The defendant testified that he paid it, and Smith thereupon delivered it to him, while the latter swore it had never been paid, and was not delivered. Circumstances were then proven tending to support the testimony of each, and this evidence is that to which the instruction must have been applied; that is, as said by the court, “only evidentiary facts tending to corroborate other evidence.” In Bradshaw v. State (Neb.) 22 N. W. 365, the instruction was held, in view of others not set out, not to refer to matters essential to be found in order to convict. Here the error is emphasized by repetition, in substance, though in different language, in the eighteenth paragraph of the charge; and by none is...
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