State v. Steffen
| Decision Date | 24 June 1929 |
| Docket Number | No. 39540.,39540. |
| Citation | 226 N.W. 46 |
| Parties | STATE v. STEFFEN. |
| Court | Iowa Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Appeal from District Court, Pottawattamie County; O. D. Wheeler, Judge.
Defendant appeals from a judgment convicting him of breaking and entering a store building. Reversed.
John J. Hess, of Council Bluffs, for appellant.
John Fletcher, Atty. Gen., and Neill Garrett, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.
The store building entered had a rear entrance from the alley and a front entrance from the street. Krouse, a state's witness, testifies that in passing the rear end of the building about 10:30 p. m. he noticed that the shutters had been left open and the rear window and storm window broken; that he heard a noise inside. He ran toward the street, and, as he got halfway out, heard the front window crash. He ran out on the sidewalk. He saw a man coming out of the opening in the door. Krouse shot, and the man fell. Another man “came right by him,” but got away. The defendant is the man that was shot. Defendant testifies to the effect that he had been on a street car on which he was seen by one of his witnesses; that defendant got off the car about 10:20 or 10:30 at the street on which the building broken into was located. About a block or a block and a half from the building he stopped a minute or so, and talked with a couple of witnesses. (These witnesses say it was about 10 or 10:15.) Defendant says that he walked on, “that he got a few feet past the door that was all crashed out, the glass busted out, and I kind of looked round to see what was going on and I walked on several feet from there and a fellow passed me * * * and as he ran past this Krouse ran around the side and started to shoot and shot me and let the other fellow go.” The witnesses say that about a minute or two after defendant left them they heard shots fired. They do not say that they heard the shots from the direction of the broken building. The witness who was on the street car says he saw defendant on the car; that witness got off the car a few minutes after ten.
[1] I. The court charged that defendant had offered evidence of alibi, and that the burden of proof to establish it was upon defendant. Defendant admitted that he was present on the sidewalk in front of the building broken into when the man who was in the building was coming out. The conflict here is between the state's evidence to the effect that the man that was shot came out of the building and defendant's testimony that he was the man that was shot, but it was another man who came out of the building. Of course, if defendant's testimony was believed, he was not in the building at the time that the burglar broke out; was not the person who the state's evidence tended to show was in the building and one of the burglars. We are of the opinion that the evidence offered by defendant was designed merely to meet the state's case by way of controverting the identification of him as the burglar; that defendant's evidence was offered merely in negation; and that the testimony as to his whereabouts immediately preceding the shooting was explanatory and corroborative only of his testimony, and did not raise the defense of alibi. State v. Wagner (Iowa) 222 N. W. 407;State v. Bird (Iowa) 222 N. W. 411; Id. (Iowa) 220 N. W. 111, and cases there cited; State v. Ireland, 192 Iowa, 489, 185 N. W. 35.
The instruction, we think, tended to give the jury the understanding that the burden of proof was upon defendant to show that, at the time of the crime, he was at another and different place, and was misleading. The real question in this particular was, as has been said, whether it was the burglar escaping from the building who was shot, and whether the defendant was the person so escaping, not whether the defendant was elsewhere at the time of the burglary so situated that he could not have committed the crime. So far as his whereabouts was involved, it was involved only accidentally, and not as a separate defense. Defendant admittedly was in the vicinity. He was not so far away that he could not have been the burglar. He does not claim to have been under any physical restraint either by being on a moving car or otherwise at the time the crime was in course of perpetration. Time and place and circumstances were introduced to negative the state's evidence rather than to set up the affirmative defense of impossibility that defendant could have broken or entered the building. References to time are descriptive, explanatory, general.
[2] II. The proprietor of the store testified that he was in the store the next day when pieces of glass were gathered up and put in a paper sack; that he kept them, and turned them over to a police officer in the same condition in which they were when they were picked up. He does not say where they were when they were picked up. His testimony is too vague to found upon it the conclusion that...
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Grice v. State, 21458.
...for the purpose of identification, not as a circumstance but as a fact. The Supreme Court of Iowa has held in the opinion of State v. Steffen, 1929, 226 N.W. 46, that where finger prints found on pieces of window glass were the finger prints of the accused that the pieces of glass with the ......
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State v. Steffen
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