State v. Norwood

• Citation: 115 N.C. 789,20 S.E. 712
• Parties: STATE. v. NORWOOD.
• Decision Date: 27 December 1894
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of North Carolina

20 S.E. 712

115 N.C. 789

STATE.

v.NORWOOD.

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Dec. 27, 1894.

Homicide—Deadly Weapon—Murder in the First Degree.

1. The pushing of a pin down an infant's throat, producing its death thereby, is killing it with a deadly weapon.

2. One is presumed sane.

3. One deliberately determining to take a child's life by putting pins down its throat, who carries his purpose into execution, producing the child's death, is guilty of murder in the first degree.

Appeal from superior court, Durham county; Shuford, Judge.

Ella Norwood was convicted of murder, and appeals. Affirmed.

C. E. Turner and F. A. Green, for appellant.

The Attorney General, for the State.

AVERY, J. If the prisoner did not put the pins in the child's mouth, or if, though she placed them there, they were not the instrumental cause of its death, she was not guilty, and so the court told tie jury. If the jury found—as they must have done, un der the instructions of the court—that she brought about its death, it was a killing with a deadly weapon. The question whether an instrument with which a personal injury has been inflicted is a deadly weapon depends, not infrequently, more upon the manner of its use than upon the intrinsic character of the instrument itself. State v. Huntley, 91 N. C. 620. We may expect death to ensue from pushing such a pin down the throat of an infant, just as we may look for death or serious bodily harm as a consequence of firing a pistol into a crowd of human beings, or at a particular person. The intentional killing with a deadly weapon, when proved or admitted, raises a presumption of malice; and such evidence would, before the enactment of the recent statute establishing and defining the two grades of that crime, have amounted to prima facie proof of murder. But now, though the fact of such killing still gives rise to the presumption of malice, and is prima facie evidence of murder in the second degree, it does not show that the act was done deliberately or after premeditation. State v. Fuller, 114 N. C. 899, 19 S. E. 797; 2 Bish. Cr. Law, § 703; Com. v. Drum, 58 Pa. St. 9; People v. Cox, 76 Cal. 285, 18 Pac. 332. In order to conviction of murder in the first degree, as the judge below properly instructed the jury, it was necessary that the state should show that the prisoner deliberately determined to take the child's life by putting the pin or pins into its mouth, and thereupon (it being immaterial how soon after resolving to do so) carried her...