People v. Williams

ANGELLOTTI, C. J.

The defendant was convicted of the crime of murder in the first degree for the killing of his wife, Emily Williams, on February 7, 1920. He appeals from the judgment pronounced upon such conviction, and also from an order denying his motion for a new trial, and an order denying his motion in arrest of judgment.

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The order denying the motion in arrest of judgment is not an appealable order. Any error of a trial court in denying such a motion is reviewable on the appeal from the judgment. There is no suggestion that the trial court erred in denying the motion in this ease. It is clear that the information presented and filed against him in the superior court was without defect of any kind. (Pen. Code, see. 1185.)

The only defense in the case was that defendant committed the act charged without being conscious thereof, and that he was temporarily insane. The undisputed facts left little room for any other defense than insanity. Mrs. Williams had left the apartment at 275 Turk Street, where she and her husband were living, about two months prior to February 7, 1920, and thenceforth they lived separate and apart, she, with a daughter by a former marriage, at the Bernal Apartments, on Seventeenth Street, near Church Street, and he at the King Edward Apartments, at 275 Turk Street. She had commenced an action for a divorce, and issue had been joined therein and the case set for trial. An order for the payment of temporary alimony had been made, and deceased was en

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deavoring to collect the same, none of which was ever paid. According to defendant’s story, he was earnestly seeking her return to him. During the afternoon of February 7, 1920, he got into telephonic communication with her, she then being in the apartment of a friend, a Mrs. Brown, in the King Edward Apartment building, and she definitely informed him that she would not return to him. A little later in the afternoon, when deceased and Mrs. Brown left the building to go to the office of the attorney of the former, they encountered defendant on the street at the entrance to the building, and he made a violent assault upon the deceased and endeavored to drag her back into the building. She managed to escape and, with Mrs. Brown, went to the Hall of Justice and procured a warrant for the arrest of defendant. Later she and Mrs. Brown started for the apartment of deceased, taking a street-car for the comer of Church and Seventeenth Streets. In the meantime defendant purchased a revolver at a pawnbroker’s place on Third Street, near Market Street, and, with the same fully loaded in his possession, went first to the apartment occupied by deceased on Seventeenth Street, near Church Street. He gained access to the apartment, but was ordered out by the landlady when complaint of his presence was made by the daughter of deceased. He then left the house and went to the corner of Church and Seventeenth Streets, near which place he was when the street-car on which were deceased and Mrs. Brown arrived. When they saw him after deceased alighted from the car, deceased started to run to her apartment and defendant pursued her. The daughter, who had come out to meet her mother, attempted to stop him, succeeding in talcing hold of him, and he shot her, inflicting a mortal wound, and continued his pursuit of deceased. He overtook her and shot her twice, she imploring him not to shoot, and as the result of the wounds inflicted she died almost immediately. The evidence as a whole was such as to show very clearly that he went to the neighborhood of his wife’s habitation with the deliberate purpose of putting her to death, unless she would return to him, and that he killed her in pursuance of such deliberate intent. In view of the record, his testimony to the effect that he remembered nothing that occurred between about noon on February 7th and the next morning is so incredible as to be unworthy of consideration, and'there is nothing else to suggest that he