State v. Tapp

• Decision Date: 27 June 1916
• Docket Number: 9400.
• Citation: 89 S.E. 394,105 S.C. 55
• Parties: STATE v. TAPP ET AL.
• Court: South Carolina Supreme Court

89 S.E. 394

105 S.C. 55

STATE v. TAPP ET AL.

No. 9400.

Supreme Court of South Carolina

June 27, 1916

Appeal from General Sessions Circuit Court of Greenville County; R W. Memminger, Judge.

Charles Tapp and John Pruitt were convicted of manslaughter, and Lizzie Pruitt as accessory after the fact, and they appeal. Reversed and remanded.

The charge directed reported is as follows:

"Now, to say that you men cannot decide a point, and not be absolutely satisfied upon it on circumstantial evidence, is absolute folly. There is a case, which was tried over here in Oconee county, where the man claimed that he woke up at night and heard a noise down in his cattle yard, and that he got up and went down there to see what was the matter, and that while he was out of the house he heard a gun shoot; when he came back, he found his wife, lying there on the bed, had taken a gun, so he claimed and pressed it to the side of her, and took a poker, and that he found her in the condition he claimed with her head completely blown off, and he went out among his neighbors and told them of his discovery. The state succeeded in establishing (and the jury believed it) that there was a circumstance which he had intended which fully disposed of the whole reason of his story. The woman's hands were under the cover. So you see there, now, gentlemen, it would have been utterly impossible for her to pull this trigger with the gun from under the cover and both hands covered. So you can readily see there was a circumstance which was believed by the jury so as to overcome the whole thing, that he had brought about the death of his wife; and he was convicted."

James H. Price, of Greenville, for appellants.

P. A. Bonham, of Greenville, for the State.

HYDRICK J.

The defendants, Charles Tapp, John Pruitt, and Lizzie Pruitt, were indicted for the murder of Minnie England--the two first named as principals, the third as accessory before and after the fact. The verdict was: "Charles Tapp and John Pruitt guilty of manslaughter; Lizzie Pruitt guilty as accessory after the fact manslaughter."

The defendants and deceased lived together in the country in the home of Lizzie Pruitt. About 4 o'clock in the morning of October 5 or 6, 1915, John Pruitt aroused some of the neighbors, and told them that Minnie was dead; that she had left home about 3 o'clock in the afternoon before to go to a neighbor's house, carrying a shotgun with her; that she returned about 10 o'clock that night, after they had retired, and aroused them, saying that she had accidently been shot--that she stumbled and fell, and the gun went off and shot her; that she lingered until about 3 o'clock in the morning, at which hour she died. No physician or other help was summoned until after she was dead. The fatal shot was received several hundred yards from the house of Lizzie Pruitt. The physician who examined deceased testified that the load went diagonally through her body and slightly downward from the point of entrance, entering the right breast below the nipple and coming out the left side of the back, and that, in his opinion, it would have been impossible for her to have walked from the place where she was shot to the Pruitt home.

The magistrate residing in the neighborhood was among the first notified of the death. He and his constable went immediately to the Pruitt house, and, later in the day, acting as coroner, he held an inquest. He testified that he instructed his constable to keep the defendants at the house, and they were called separately and examined under oath before the coroner's jury. They were not cautioned that charges were to be or might be preferred against them, or in any way advised of their legal right to refuse to give evidence which might incriminate themselves. At the trial, their testimony, as taken down at the inquest, was admitted against them over their objection.

The first exception, assigning the admission of this...