People v. Searle

KERRIGAN, J.

The defendant was charged in an information by the district attorney of the county of Contra Costa with the crime of murder. He was tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to imprisonment in the state prison at San Quentin for a term of eight years. The present appeal is from the judgment and from an order denying defendant’s motion for a new trial.

Appellant presents but three grounds of appeal, viz., insufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict; that the

corpus delicti

was not proved independently of the extrajudicial admissions of the defendant, and that the view by the jury of the scene of the crime in the absence of the defendant was a violation of his constitutional right.

Dealing with the first point urged, the defendant is alleged to have shot one Patrick Conroy on June 4, 1916. The testimony shows that the deceased was found that afternoon

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about 5 o’clock mortally wounded on a ranch in the county mentioned. He and one Joe Hickey, two itinerant laborers, were friends and companions, and had been such for a period of eight years. On the afternoon of said June 4th, walking along the railroad track in the- vicinity they came to a small shed on a ranch belonging to one I. T. Coe, which they selected as their resting place for the night. They unrolled their blankets, and Conroy went to get some water at a pump about four hundred feet away from the shed. About five minutes thereafter Hickey heard a shot. He paid little attention to it, but a few minutes later, Conroy not having returned, he proceeded to the pump to look for him, and there found Conroy prone upon the ground with a bullet wound in his head. He immediately ran to the county road close by to summon help, and there met Coe and the defendant. First aid was given to Conroy, and the defendant was sent by Coe, by whom he was employed, to a town a mile away for medical aid. The defendant was a stranger in the county, and at this time had been employed by Coe for about two weeks only. He slept in a cabin some two hundred feet from the pump near which the body of the deceased was found. About a week before the shooting Coe had loaned the defendant a loaded Winchester rifle. About half an hour before Conroy was shot the defendant had left Coe, with whom he had been working repairing a fence, to do the evening chores. Later he returned. During his absence Coe heard the report of a gun, and it was a few minutes after defendant’s return to where Coe was still working on the fence that Hickey arrived with the news that his “partner” had been shot. Shortly after the defendant had been dispatched for a doctor, Hickey, who was assisting Coe in his ministrations to the wounded man, caught a glimpse of a man going around the cabin occupied by the defendant. Early the next morning Conroy died. When Hickey announced that his companion had been shot, the defendant (who, it appears, had taken that day several drinks of intoxicating liquor) volunteered the statement that some men or boys had been shooting rabbits in the neighborhood, and that he had heard several gunshots that afternoon—seeking perhaps to convey the inference that Conroy had been shot through the carelessness of hunters. Suspicion attached to the defendant, and he was put under arrest that night. At first he stoutly denied that he had discharged any