State v. Harvey
| Citation | 106 N.W. 938,130 Iowa 394 |
| Parties | THE STATE OF IOWA, Appellee, v. CLYDE HARVEY & HATTIE HARVEY, Appellants |
| Decision Date | 09 April 1906 |
| Court | United States State Supreme Court of Iowa |
Appeal from Carroll District Court.--HON. F. M. POWERS, Judge.
THE defendants were convicted on a charge of arson, and appeal.-- Reversed and remanded.
Reversed.
M. W Beach and Sharp & Percy, for appellants.
Chas W. Mullan, Attorney General, and L. De Graff, Assistant Attorney General, for the State.
The defendants are husband and wife, and, at the date of the alleged crime, were about twenty-three years of age. A short time after their marriage, and a few months before the date of the alleged crime, they purchased a restaurant business conducted in a frame building on the principal street of Glidden, Iowa. They kept a small stock of restaurant goods and served meals to transients and boarders, and also had a few beds for the use of lodgers. The former owner of the business had insured the goods owned and used on the premises for $ 800, which amount was thereafter increased by the defendants to $ 900. It is not seriously urged on part of the state that the property was overinsured. The building was an old wooden frame, and by its side, with but a narrow space between, was another old frame building owned by one Ford. On the night of August 6, 1904, there were in the restaurant building the defendants, a servant girl, and two lodgers, spoken of in the record as the Hobbs boys. All had retired; the defendants occupying a room on the ground floor, and the servant and the Hobbs boys occupying the rooms upstairs. Soon after midnight a citizen of the town discovered a fire breaking out in the narrow space between the restaurant and the Ford building; but the evidence is neither conclusive nor clear as to whether it had broken out through the wall of one of these structures or had originated on the outside. About the time the alarm was given the defendants claim to have been awakened and, discovering the fire, sprang from bed, and, after hastily putting on a few garments, picked up a trunk which contained clothing and other property and with it escaped through the bedroom window. The husband then went up an outside stairway to the second story and aroused the servant, but says that the fire had made such progress that he could not go farther, but shouted an alarm to the lodgers. Coming back he was told by some one in the crowd that the Hobbs boys, or one of them, had been seen; but this proved to be a mistake, and the unfortunate young men were burned in the building. Several circumstances served to excite the suspicion that defendants had themselves destroyed the building, with the result that they were jointly indicted for the supposed crime and put on trial. Having been convicted and sentenced to the penitentiary for a term of three years, they appeal. Many exceptions are taken to the rulings of the trial court and to the giving and refusing of instructions, but we shall not extend this opinion to discuss them all.
I. Among other things the court charged the jury as follows: " The appellants complain that the jury were here told, or at least that the jurors could readily so interpret the language of the court, that proof beyond reasonable doubt that one of them feloniously and maliciously set the fire would justify the conviction of both of the crime charged against them. In our judgment the criticism is warranted. The instruction states three essential things which must be shown before the "defendants" (speaking of them jointly) can be found guilty, and of these essentials one is said to be that "the defendants or one of them willfully, feloniously, and maliciously set said building on fire."
Counsel for the state attempt to justify the charge on the ground that the prosecution was based upon the theory that if any crime was committed it was accomplished by the co-operation of both defendants, and that the circumstances were such that of necessity both must be convicted or both must be acquitted. Such may have been the theory of the prosecutor, but it does not follow that he was entitled to have any such proposition submitted to the jury. It is too well established to justify argument that upon the trial of two defendants jointly charged with crime (except where from the very nature of the offense charged it must have been jointly committed, if at all), it is not within the province of the court to say to the jury that both must be convicted or both acquitted. 1 Wharton's Criminal Law, 693; State v. McClintock, 8 Iowa 203; McClellan v. State, 53 Ala. 640.
It is very possible that the circumstances of a given case may be such that a verdict of guilty as to one of two defendants and of not guilty as to the other would be grossly unreasonable, and yet, if the case be not one for a directed verdict of acquittal as to one or both of the accused, the right of each to have the question of his individual guilt or innocence passed upon by the jury can not rightfully be denied. If the court had elsewhere in its charge stated to the jury the rule of law to which we have adverted and explained its application to the case on trial we could perhaps safely say that the error in the paragraph under consideration was without prejudice, but no such instruction was given, except as the same might be inferred from the submission of blank forms upon which a verdict of guilty as to one, and not guilty as to the other defendant, could be returned. But the jury should not be left to infer the proper rule in a matter of such prime importance.
Moreover it is to be remembered that these defendants are husband and wife and the law indulges a presumption that the participation of a wife in the crime of her husband, or the act of a wife in the commission of...
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