Williams v. State
| Decision Date | 27 January 1960 |
| Citation | 117 So.2d 473 |
| Parties | James A. WILLIAMS, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
Paul Lake, Tampa, for appellant.
Richard W. Ervin, Atty. Gen., and Odis M. Henderson, Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellee.
The evidence in this case which led to a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree and the ultimate sentence of death in the electric chair was circumstantial and we will, therefore, judge it carefully by the rule lately announced in Davis v. State, Fla., 90 So.2d 629, and in the cases cited in that opinion.
The contention of the appellant that the judgment should be reversed poses two questions for decision by this court, namely, the sufficiency of proof to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the appellant committed the crime charged in the indictment and the propriety of the trial judge's ruling permitting witnesses for the state to testify about an incident, in which appellant was an actor, that occurred about a month after the homicide.
The murder for which the appellant was condemned was committed in the H & K Market, 26 April 1958; the later crime, robbery, was perpetrated at the Blue Grass Market the 24th of the following month. Both places of business were located in St. Petersburg. In the former, Herman Kaplan was shot to death; in the latter, a man was wounded but not fatally.
Kaplan was shot six times with a .25 calibre automatic pistol as he was closing his store about 8:15 in the evening. No one actually witnessed the killing but a man working nearby heard the shots, saw the flashes and watched a Negro flee from the building. The body of the victim of the assault, which is not denied to have culminated in murder in the first degree, was found on the floor by the cash register. The drawer in the register was open and it contained no money except 'change,' although a day's trading had just ended.
There was testimony that at the time of the shooting the defendant was in the vicinity but witnesses called by him tended to establish an alibi. Their stories were conflicting and obviously were discarded by the jury.
Were we to stop here we would be compelled to conclude that the appellant's guilt had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But we go from the H & K Market to the Blue Grass Market to describe the action there, in which the appellant assumed a leading role, and then we will turn to the links claimed by the State to couple the two events and, therefore, to connect the appellant with the earlier one.
The Blue Grass was robbed at closing time, about 8:15 P.M., by two Negroes, appellant and an accomplice named Isiah Cole. The butcher in the store was wounded by a pistol in the hands of appellant. The robbers fled to Tampa in a Pontiac automobile and there got into difficulties with the police. They were halted by two officers for minor infraction of a traffic regulation. Cole became very belligerent and appeared to the officers to be drunk so they arrested him. Appellant drove away in the car and shortly afterward returned afoot and undertook to convince the patrolmen they should release Cole. He, too, became threatening and was placed under arrest. Meanwhile the officers had searched Cole and found a large amount of money. When the appellant and Cole had been sent to the police station in the patrol wagon the policemen began a search for the car that lasted four hours. They found it parked several blocks away. Near the front door were two one-dollar bills and a short distance away a twenty-dollar bill. In the trunk were a sizeable sum of money and two revolvers. One of the weapons was later identified as the property of the owner of the Blue Grass Market which had been wielded by the unfortunate butcher in an attempt to prevent the robbery; the other was eventually shown to have been the one from which was fired the bullet that wounded the butcher in the later robbery and the bullet that killed Kaplan on the earlier occasion. Because of this circumstance, upon which the state relied to connect the defendant with the two crimes hence to make relevant the evidence of the robbery perpetrated a month after the homicide, we do not think we need to dwell on cases in which it has been held that evidence of unrelated crimes is inadmissible. It had long been recognized that an exception to the rule existed when the execution of other criminal acts showed that the accused had been following a pattern or mode of operation. Talley v. State, 160 Fla. 593, 36 So.2d 201.
Inasmuch as the appellant, in his brief, concedes the clarity of the evidence that the bullet which killed Kaplan and the one which wounded the butcher came from the same gun, there is no occasion to elaborate on the testimony of the ballistic expert of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by whom this fact was established.
Some of the history of the lethal instrument seems...
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