Wood v. State
| Decision Date | 07 March 1979 |
| Docket Number | No. 34564,34564 |
| Parties | WOOD v. The STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Robert H. Green, Milledgeville, for appellant.
Joseph H. Briley, Dist. Atty., Arthur K. Bolton, Atty. Gen., W. Davis Hewitt, Staff Asst. Atty. Gen., for appellee.
Appellant, Lewis Wood, was indicted for the murder of his wife, convicted by a Jones County jury and appeals his sentence of life imprisonment.
1. In his first enumeration of error, appellant alleges that the trial court erred in not granting his motion for a new trial, and in his sixth enumeration, he argues that the court erred in not granting his motion for a directed verdict of not guilty. To support each of these enumerations, appellant claims that the evidence introduced at trial was insufficient to support the verdict. The standard used by this court in reviewing the overruling of each of these motions is the same; i. e., the "any evidence" test. Sheppard v. State, 235 Ga. 89, 218 S.E.2d 830 (1975); Bethay v. State, 235 Ga. 371, 219 S.E.2d 743 (1975). If the verdict as rendered can be sustained under any reasonable view of the evidence submitted to the jury, the verdict of the jury will not be disturbed on appeal.
A review of the record in this case presents evidence that would authorize a jury to find that the appellant had been arguing with his wife immediately prior to the time she was shot; that appellant was angry because he believed his wife was becoming too friendly with another man; that appellant had to be restrained from confronting this other man; and that appellant was holding the weapon when it discharged, shooting his wife once in the neck. While the evidence could possibly support other hypotheses, such as appellant's defense of accident, there is clearly sufficient evidence to support the jury's verdict that appellant's actions resulted from malice, rather than from accident.
2. Appellant's second enumeration of error contends that a portion of the trial court's pretrial charge was an incorrect statement of law which was highly prejudicial. The allegedly improper portion of the charge stated: Appellant contends that this portion of the charge implies that the jury must make the facts appear in such a manner that a verdict of guilty must be reached.
A trial court's charge to the jury must be read as a whole in determining whether the charge contained error. State v. McNeill, 234 Ga. 696, 217 S.E.2d 281 (1976). The complained-of sentences in this charge concluded a paragraph in which the trial judge had correctly instructed the jury that the arguments of counsel were not to be considered as evidence. The "they" in the last sentence referred,...
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