State v. Varnado

• Decision Date: 05 June 1911
• Docket Number: 18,799
• Citation: 128 La. 883,55 So. 562
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court
• Parties: STATE v. VARNADO

55 So. 562

128 La. 883

STATE v. VARNADO

No. 18,799

Supreme Court of Louisiana

June 5, 1911

Appeal from Twenty-Fifth Judicial District Court, Parish of Tangipahoa; Robert S. Ellis, Judge.

Lawrence Varnado was convicted of manslaughter, and he appeals. Reversed and remanded.

R. C. &amp S. Reid and Brittain B. Purser, for appellant.

Walter Guion, Atty. Gen., and W. H. McClendon, Dist. Atty. (Thomas M. Bankston and G. A. Gondran, of counsel), for the State.

PROVOSTY J. BREAUX, C.J., concurs in the decree.

OPINION

PROVOSTY J.

The accused was sentenced to one year in the penitentiary on conviction of manslaughter, and has appealed.

In overruling a motion for a new trial the learned trial judge said:

"The question which presents itself to the court is whether or not it is the duty of the court to pass upon the credibility of witnesses on this motion for a new trial; the question of facts being one entirely left to the jury under the law. The court will say, however, that its opinion of all the testimony does not leave that reasonable certainty on the mind of the court as to the guilt of the accused which the law requires of the juror; but the question being one solely of the evidence, and the jurors being the exclusive judges of that evidence, the court being as liable to err in its opinion of the credibility of the witnesses as the jurors, the court, with this statement of fact for the future guidance of the court in case the Supreme Court should hold that it is within the power of the district court to interfere with the verdict of the jury of the question of facts, the court overrules the motion for a new trial."

So far as the question of power to have granted this new trial is concerned, we do not understand how our learned Brother could have doubted. Nobody has ever doubted that the trial judge has the power to set aside a verdict which in his opinion is "contrary to the evidence," or, in other words, not supported by the evidence. The existence of this power has been expressly recognized in innumerable cases. State v. Hauser, 112 La. 314, 36 So. 396; State v. Maloney, 115 La. 509, 39 So. 539; State v. Allen, 113 La. 705, 37 So. 614; State v. John, 109 La. 1089, 34 So. 98; State v. Moreau, 50 La.Ann. 9, 22 So. 966; State v. Seipel, 104 La. 73, 28 So. 880; State v. Miller, 107 La. 798, 32 So. 191; State v. Brown, 16 La.Ann. 384. And the question of duty in such a case is not more doubtful. The verdict in such a case is erroneous, and a verdict dictated by error is as much an instrument of injustice, and therefore as abhorrent to the law, whose minister the judge is, as a verdict dictated by prejudice, hatred, or fraud. Duty is the correlative of power. If in his greater knowledge and wider experience, to which the law has trusted in setting him up over the verdicts of juries, the judge is convinced that the jury condemned an accused in a case of reasonable doubt -- that is to say, in a case in which the law enjoins there must be an acquittal and not a condemnation -- and he does nothing, he does wrong. To do nothing in that conjuncture, is to do wrong. The power has been intrusted to him to be exercised, not at his caprice, but in every case where his own enlightened judgment tells him an error has been committed. In the machinery for the administration of criminal justice he is the sole provision made for rectifying the verdicts of juries on questions of fact. If, therefore, in a proper case he fails to act, the accused is left remediless. Whether any particular case calls for his intervention is a matter for him, and him alone, to decide. Therefore the sentence and the judgment refusing the new trial will have to be set aside, and the case remanded for further action by the judge on the motion for new trial.

It may be well that we pass on some...