White v. State

• Decision Date: 19 April 1944
• Docket Number: 27928.
• Citation: 54 N.E.2d 106,222 Ind. 423
• Parties: WHITE v. STATE.
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

54 N.E.2d 106

222 Ind. 423

WHITE v. STATE.

No. 27928.

Supreme Court of Indiana

April 19, 1944

Appeal from Criminal Court, Marion County; Edwin McClure, Special judge.

T Ernest Maholm and Ira M. Holmes, both of Indianapolis, for appellant.

James A. Emmert, Atty. Gen., and Frank Hamilton and Frank E Coughlin, Deputy Attys. Gen., for appellee.

RICHMAN Judge.

Appellant was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life imprisonment. The only error assigned is overruling his motion for a new trial. The only question properly saved and presented by the briefs is the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain the verdict.

There is evidence that appellant learned about midnight that his wife to whom he had been unfaithful was also unfaithful to him; he took her with him to confront the other man, knocked him down with his fist and left; at 2 o'clock in the morning he borrowed a rifle, ostensibly to go squirrel hunting; during the day he remained at home with her; early in the afternoon his wife's seventeen year old nephew called at the home and found him sitting in one room with his wife sewing in another room; the rifle as 'sitting up beside appellant's chair'; the nephew started to pick it up, was told to leave it alone, that it was loaded; he asked appellant what he was going to do with it and he said 'he was going to use it on that bitch sitting in the other room'; a quarrel ensued between appellant and his wife, and the nephew left the house at appellant's request; the wife was killed by two rifle bullets later in the afternoon; appellant called one of his friends about 9:30 that night asking him to come to the house, saying also that he had shot his wife; when the friend and three other persons arrived appellant was found with the rifle; he showed them the body and they left and notified the police; in conversations with four different officers and the deputy coroner who were at the house by 10:30 P.M. he said that he had shot his wife because she had told him she was in love with another man. Typical of this testimony concerning these conversations is the following of a detective sergeant as abstracted in appellant's brief:

'When I arrived at 605 North Grant, I went in the front door which led into the living room, and in the next room back of that. I found three police officers and Bernard L. White, in the next room which was the dining room and would be the third room back. The body of Mary L. White was lying by the dining room table. She was dead. Bernard White was sitting on a small bench in the southeast corner of the second room near a small table there.

'I walked over to him and had a conversation with him. I asked him who the woman was that was shot and he told me it was his wife Mary L. White and that he had shot her in the stomach and the left breast along about four (4) o'clock that afternoon when she told him that she was in love with some other man. He told me he shot her with a rifle, and identified the rifle that was there.'

It is unnecessary to relate further details. The evidence occupies 1100 pages in the transcript and the condensed recital thereof covers 100 pages in appellant's printed brief. By photographs of the scene before decedent's body was removed and testimony of the policemen, coroner and deputy coroner, all of the circumstances surrounding the crime were shown to the jury. There is nothing in the record that tends materially to contradict appellant's own reiterated story of the killing and his motive. The jury had ample evidence from which it could infer that appellant 'purposely and with premediated malice' killed his wife.

A special plea of insanity brought in issue appellant's mental capacity at the time of the shooting. Two physicians were appointed pursuant to § 9-1702 Burns' 1942 Replacement, § 2216 Baldwin's 1934, and prior to the trial made a written report, filed as a paper in the cause upon which the judge based a finding that appellant had sufficient mental capacity to go to trial and make his defense. The report rehearsed conversations of the physicians with appellant and their observation of him during a conference for that purpose which was followed by several paragraphs entitled 'Conclusions and Opinions' and two final paragraphs entitled 'Diagnosis'. The...