People v. Douglas

NOURSE, P. J.

The defendant was tried to a jury and convicted of manslaughter. He appeals from the judgment on the verdict and from the order denying a new trial.

Defendant was living in an apartment house with one Eugenia West. At 1 a. m. of the night of Nov. 16, 1946, they heard a loud noise of someone knocking at the back door. This door was reached by passing through an alley from the street to the rear of the house and ascending a stairway to a platform facing the kitchen door and a pantry window. Defendant testified that the knocking at that hour frightened him and that he took a loaded revolver, went to the pantry and shot through the window to scare the intruder; that the platform was dark and he saw no one before the shot was fired. He then heard the sound of a body falling to the platform and immediately called the police. They found the victim dead—he was a white man in the uniform of the United States Navy. The defendant and Eugenia West were both colored.

Appellant’s defense throughout the trial was an admission of the shooting as above described and a plea of justification because of his fear that the intruder was intending to break into his home. In the course of his cross-examination the district attorney asked the appellant, “Has there ever been

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any prostitution in this house?” An objection was made and sustained and misconduct assigned. Before the court could rule, the district attorney emphasized the error by stating to the jury: “This is just the circumstances of the physical house itself, as to what may have been the reason for this particular person to go there. ’ ’ Another assignment of error was made and the jury was instructed to disregard the question and the remarks of the district attorney. But the court denied appellant’s motion for a mistrial.

The conduct is plainly reversible error. The question and the remarks of the district attorney were designed for these two purposes—to degrade the appellant before the jury by intimating that he was living in a house of prostitution, and, second, to impress the jury that the deceased, a white man and a member of the Navy, could not have been thought an “intruder” in seeking to enter a “negro” house of prostitution.

People