State v. Ingram
| Decision Date | 20 December 1926 |
| Docket Number | No. 27439.,27439. |
| Citation | 289 S.W. 637 |
| Parties | STATE v. INGRAM. |
| Court | Missouri Supreme Court |
Appeal from Circuit Court, Jackson County; Nelson E. Johnson, Judge.
John D. Ingram was convicted of robbery in the first degree, and he appeals. Affirmed.
Ed. E. Aleshire and Geo. Hornecker, both of Kansas City, for appellant.
North T. Gentry, Atty. Gen., and A. B. Lovan, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.
Appellant was convicted of robbery in the first degree, was sentenced to imprisonment in the penitentiary for five years, in accordance with the verdict of the jury, and has appealed. This is a companion case to State v. George Butler, No. 27438, 289 S. W. 636, this day decided. Reference is made to the opinion in that case for facts not stated herein.
The evidence offered by the state tended to prove that on September 7, 1925, at Kansas City in Jackson county, two men came up behind an Italian named Joe Fotivez, who was sitting on the curb, seized him and held him, slashed his pocket with a knife, and fled with his pocketbook containing about $30 in United States money.
There were 40 or 50 other men sitting around near by, who were passing the noon hour in smoking and talking. No one seemed to realize that Fortivez was being robbed until the robbers started to run away. The robbers were pursued for two or three blocks. At Eighth and Delaware streets appellant and George Butler were captured. The testimony offered by the state's witnesses is that these men had run up a stairway in an office building at that corner and had been apprehended a the top of the stairs. They were afterwards brought down to the street. An officer went up the stairway, where appellant and the other robber were overtaken, and in a closet there found a pocketbook containing $30 in money and a receipt for $5, all of which Fortivez identified and claimed as his own.
Appellant and Butler were charged jointly with the crime of robbery. After a severance, Butler was tried and convicted on the day before appellant was tried. Appellant was positively identified as one of the robbers. The place at the counsel table where "the robber" sat was designated by the witnesses without calling him "the defendant," and this is urged as insufficient identification of the appellant. We will assume that if the witnesses had pointed out as the robber some one at the table other than the defendant then on trial, the trial judge and the jury would have known it. However, at a later place in the record, it appears that appellant's counsel referred to the appellant as the man sitting in the place at the counsel table designated by the witnesses as the place where "the robber" sat.
As a witness, appellant denied that he robbed Fortivez. He said he was not at Sixth and Main, where the robbery occurred, and placed himself two blocks away, near where he was arrested, at the time the robbery occurred. He said he never had seen Butler until he was apprehended at the same place where he was taken by what he termed the "mob." He had stepped aside to allow the mob to pass and never dreamed the mob was after him until he was captured. Appellant testified that he had suffered a severe fracture of his leg and limped badly and could not run fast like the robbers were said to have run. Witnesses for the state described one of the robbers as limping while he ran away. The prison physician who had examined appellant testified to a past leg fracture and complete union of the bones and said that, while one leg was shorter than the other, appellant could run fast for a short distance.
A police officer testified that, after their arrest, appellant and Butler stated that they had come to Kansas City together four or five days before and had "bummed" their way there. This statement was denied by appellant. He then called Butler as a witness, and he also denied the conversation. Butler was then shown to have been convicted for the same robbery upon his separate trial.
The information is assailed as insufficient and as charging no crime. It was set out in full and approved in the companion case, State v. Butler, No. 27438, 289 S. W. 636. What we there said concerning its sufficiency is equally applicable here.
Error is assigned because the court refused to sustain appellant's challenge to several members of the regular jury panel who had qualified as members of the panel of 30 jurors in the Butler Case the day before, but who had not been chosen as members of that trial panel. They had heard the questions asked by counsel in qualifying a panel, and had been told what the case was...
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