Yoe v. People of State

• Decision Date: 30 September 1868
• Citation: 1868 WL 5251,49 Ill. 410
• Parties: HARRIET A. YOE, Impleaded, etc.v.THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.
• Court: Illinois Supreme Court

49 Ill. 410

1868 WL 5251 (Ill.)

HARRIET A. YOE, Impleaded, etc.

v.THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

September Term, 1868.

OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE

WRIT OF ERROR to the Circuit Court of Livingston county; the Hon. CHARLES R. STARR, Judge, presiding.

The opinion states the case.

Messrs. HURD, BOOTH & KREAMER, for the plaintiff in error.

Mr. R. G. INGERSOLL, Attorney General, for the people.

Mr. CHIEF JUSTICE BREESE delivered the opinion of the Court:

The plaintiff in error, Harriet A. Yoe, was indicted in the Livingston Circuit Court, jointly with one John W. Youmans, for the murder of James Yoe, her husband. Youmans escaped arrest by flight, and the plaintiff in error, on her trial, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to confinement in the penitentiary for eight years.

To reverse this judgment the record is brought to this court by writ of error, and various errors assigned.

The points made upon the record are that the witness, Haskins, who acted as “a detective,” should have been required to answer the question of the defendant's counsel, as to what was the character of his associates in his business as a detective.

The plaintiff's counsel argues, that in a capital case, the prisoner had a right to show the character of the witness, for the purpose of affecting the credit to be given his testimony. Though much latitude is allowed, on cross-examination, in a capital case, we cannot perceive the necessity or propriety of this inquiry, and if pressed, might degenerate into investigations wholly foreign to the matter in controversy.

Another point made is, that the attorney for the people was permitted, against the objections of the prisoner, to read to the jury copious extracts from medical works, which had not been introduced in evidence, and which had not been proved by any witness to be authority, and to state to the jury that what he had read was authority upon the subject of poison by arsenic; and further, that the court allowed the State's attorney to read to the jury, against the objections of the prisoner, the evidence of Charles H. Porter, who, as professor of chemistry, had given testimony in the case of The People v. Mary Harting, 4 Parker's Crim. Rep. 297, as evidence in the case on trial.

These were errors. If the State's attorney in such a case, or in any case, read from medical books, in his argument to the jury, the court should instruct them that such books are not evidence, but theories simply, of medical men. To permit testimony given in another State to be used as evidence against a prisoner on trial in this State, was the height of injustice, as the prisoner had no opportunity to cross-examine the witness, or to meet his testimony by other evidence. It may be that Mr. Porter's ideas were all perfectly correct, but they were not proved to be so--there was no evidence before the jury that they were correct. The symptoms of poisoning by arsenic are various, and what they are, are facts which must be proved by competent testimony, like any other fact in the case.

Again, the court should not have permitted the State's attorney to make to the jury, in his closing argument, the statement that he had a witness by whom he could prove a certain declaration of the prisoner, which must have fallen upon the jury with crushing effect. It was not legitimate argument for the State's attorney, and was so out of place in a capital case, that the court should have excluded it from the jury. The principal question, however, made upon the record is, can a party indicted for murder, be found guilty as an accessory after the fact?

By our statute, an accessory before the fact is considered as a principal, and is punished accordingly; an accessory after the fact, is punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, and fined in a sum not exceeding five hundred dollars, in the discretion of the court...