Opinion
7 Div. 398.
June 30, 1928.
Appeal from Circuit Court, Shelby County; E. S. Lyman, Judge.
L. W., alias Loss, alias Lofton, Whitfield was convicted of murder in the second degree, and he appeals. Affirmed.
Defendant objected to these statements made by the solicitor in argument to the jury:
"I submit to you that human life is getting too cheap in Shelby county." "Life has been taken from time to time in Shelby county." "What are you going to do to stop it?"
Exceptions were reserved to the following portions of the court's oral charge:
"If you render a proper verdict, then there is no injury done to society by you, and, of course, no injury done to the defendant that he has any right to complain of."
"A man intends to do, as a matter of law, that which naturally and logically follows from what he actually did."
"A reasonable doubt is one for which there is a reason."
"It is their duty to put forth their best efforts in defense of their client, and they might bias and prejudice them, and it might be they did not look at the facts in the right way, and the same is true of the solicitor."
"And we are all liable to be deceived by human testimony; we all err."
"He must be without fault in bringing on the difficulty, and he must have used every reasonable way to avoid the difficulty and get away without killing his adversary."
Leeper, Wallace Saxon, of Columbiana, for appellant.
Charlie C. McCall, Atty. Gen., for the State.
No briefs reached the Reporter.
The indictment charged murder in the first degree. The trial thereunder resulted in the conviction of this appellant of murder in the second degree, and his punishment fixed at ten years' imprisonment in the penitentiary. The defendant admitted he killed Bryant Cooper by shooting him with a gun. He relied upon self-defense.
There appears in the record a substantial compliance with the statutes relative to serving defendant with a copy of the indictment and venire in this case; therefore the motion to quash was without merit.
The evidence in this case, coupled with the physical facts, made a jury question as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Several exceptions were reserved to the court's rulings upon the admission of evidence. We discover no reversible error in any of these rulings; therefore none of the exceptions can be sustained. The solicitor's argument complained of, and to which several exceptions were reserved, did not transgress the scope of legitimate argument, and there is no merit whatever in any of the exceptions to the court's oral charge. The oral charge as a whole properly stated the law governing the issues involved upon the trial of this case. It was full, fair, and complete, and in addition thereto the court gave, at the request of defendant, more than 30 special written charges. These written charges, together with the court's oral charge, fairly and substantially covered such of the refused charges as properly stated the law.
The record is without error.
Affirmed.