State v. Murray
| Decision Date | 31 October 1927 |
| Docket Number | 28723 |
| Citation | 164 La. 883,114 So. 721 |
| Court | Louisiana Supreme Court |
| Parties | STATE v. MURRAY |
Rehearing Denied November 28, 1927
Appeal from Ninth Judicial District Court, Parish of Rapides; R. C Culpepper, Judge.
Henry Murray was convicted of burglary, and he appeals.
Verdict and sentence annulled, and case remanded.
T. A Carter, of Alexandria, for appellant.
Percy Saint, Atty. Gen., Cleveland Dear, Dist. Atty., of Alexandria (E. R. Schowalter, Asst. Atty. Gen., of counsel), for the State.
O'NIELL, C. J.
The appellant was convicted of the crime of burglary and sentenced to imprisonment in the penitentiary.
The record contains four bills of exception, three of which relate to the same subject-matter. It appears that a boy named Elliott was also arrested and charged with the crime, and when he was brought to the jail, in presence of the defendant Murray, he admitted having taken part in the crime, and implicated Murray. Murray alone was brought to trial, and Elliott testified against him. When Murray took the stand as a witness he said that Elliott, in his confession in the jail, talked reluctantly and hung his head, and that his statement on the witness stand was different from that which he had made in the jail. When the district attorney was offering evidence in rebuttal, the sheriff and another witness who had heard Elliott's statement in the jail and his testimony on the trial testified that Elliott, in his statement in the jail, did not hang his head, but looked Murray in the face while telling his story, and that the story which he told then was substantially the same as that which he related on the witness stand. The defendant's attorney objected to this evidence on the ground that it was not in rebuttal of anything testified to by Murray. The judge, in his per curiam, on each of the three bills of exception, says that the testimony of the sheriff and of the other state witness was in rebuttal of what Murray had testified to; and the note of evidence taken during the trial shows that the judge's statement is correct. There is, therefore, no merit in the three bills of exception.
The fourth bill was reserved to the overruling of a motion for a new trial. It was charged in the motion that the sheriff's deputies had tampered with the jurors during the trial and influenced and persuaded them to convict the defendant. The evidence taken on the trial of the motion shows that two of the deputies did approach at least two of the jurors with a desire to talk to them about the case and to interfere with the administration of justice. One of the jurors testified that, during a recess of the court, when the case was on trial, one of the deputies, in a restaurant asked him what he thought about the Murray case, and that he, the juror, replied that he thought they were trying the wrong man -- meaning that Elliott was the guilty party; and that, on the next day, during the trial, the same deputy stopped him on the street in front of the court house, and said to him: "I want you to do what you can to convict this man; we want to get shed (meaning rid) of him." The deputy, testifying on the trial of the motion, gave his version of the incident in the restaurant, thus: The juror began the conversation by asking the deputy: "What is this other boy [Elliott] charged with?" The deputy looked around the room, and then said to the juror: "You can't talk in here." They then walked out of the restaurant, and the deputy said to the juror: "They have him charged with the same thing that the one on trial is." The juror then asked why they did not try the other boy, and the deputy replied: "Its the sentiment of the people that they are both guilty and they would like to have them stuck." Thereafter, in his testimony, the deputy said that he told the juror that it was the sentiment of the people that both Murray and Elliott were guilty and that he, the deputy, would like to have them stuck. The deputy testified that he was not certain whether he had talked to the juror about the case again the next day on the street, but he virtually admitted that he had so spoken to him again; and the fact...
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