State v. Walker

• Decision Date: 06 April 1927
• Docket Number: (No. 322.)
• Citation: 137 S.E. 429
• Parties: STATE. v. WALKER.
• Court: North Carolina Supreme Court

(193 N.C. 489)

137 S.E. 429

STATE.

v.WALKER.

(No. 322.)

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

April 6, 1927.

Appeal from Superior Court, Durham County; Lyon, Judge.

Ernest Walker was convicted of murder in the first degree, and he appeals. No error.

Mel. J. Thompson and B. Ray Olive, both of Durham, for appellant.

D. G. Brummitt, Atty. Gen., and Frank Nash, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.

STACY, C. J. [1] There is evidence on behalf of the state tending to show that on the night of July 25, 1926, the prisoner, Ernest P. Walker, a colored man, burglariously entered a dwelling house in the city of Durham, in the nighttime, with intent to steal the goods and chattels of another then being in said dwelling house, ravished Louie Cassidy, a colored woman, one of the occupants therein, murdered her husband, Joseph Cassidy, also an occupant of the house, by striking him three times on the head with an ax, successfully made his escape, and was arrested at his home three or four days thereafter. The murder, for which alone the prisoner has been tried and convicted, was committed in the perpetration of rape, robbery, and burglary. The charge "is not denied; in fact, the corpus delicti, with all of its attendant atrociousness, is admitted. The defense interposed by the prisoner amounts to a plea of insanity alleged to have been aggravated by intoxication or drunkenness at the time. The evidence tending to support this plea was properly submitted to the jury, and was rejected or found to be unsatisfactory. State v. Campbell, 184 N. C. 765, 114 S. E. 927; State v. Terry, 173 N. C. 761, 92 S. E. 154.

It is well settled, by a long line of decisions, that, in this jurisdiction, as well as in many others, in a criminal prosecution, where insanity is interposed as a defense, the burden of proof is on the defendant who sets it up to prove such insanity, not beyond a reasonable doubt, but to the satisfaction of the jury. State v. Jones, 191 N. C. 753, 133 S. E. 81, and cases there cited.

The only questions presented by the defendant's appeal relate to the correctness of certain instructions contained in the court's charge to the jury, and to the refusal of his honor to give, without modification, as requested, two of the prisoner's prayers for special instructions.

The first exception is directed to the following portion of the charge:

"Now before you can convict the defendant of murder in the first degree, you must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt (and the burden is on the state to satisfy you that the killing was either done in premeditation and deliberation or was done in the commission or attempt to commit some other felony, burglary, rape, or arson)."

The prisoner excepts and assigns as error only that part of the instruction in parenthesis. If the part to which the prisonerexcepts contained all that the judge said in regard to the burden of proof, which it does not, clearly the instruction would be erroneous, for in every criminal prosecution the prisoner's plea of traverse casts upon the state the burden of establishing his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before a verdict can be rendered against him. State v. Tucker, 190 N. C. 708, 130 S. E, 720; State v. Singleton, 183 N. C. 738, 110 S. E. 846; Speas v. Bank, 188 N. C. 524, 125 S. E. 398. But the prisoner is not permitted to take parts of sentences, or select detached portions of the charge, and assign errors as to them, when, if considered with other portions, they are readily explained, and the charge in its entirety appears to be correct. Every instruction must be considered with reference to what precedes and follows it. In other words, it must be taken in its setting. As has so often been said, the court's charge is to...