People v. Daily

McFARLAND, J.

The defendant was charged with the murder of one Lemuel Metis, and was convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to suffer the penalty of death, lie appeals from the judgment and from an order denying a motion for a new trial.

There is really no doubt of appellant’s guilt, if he was not insane at the time of the homicide; and the main contention of his counsel is, that the jury should have acquitted him on the ground of insanity. It would be useless to review the evidence here; and it is enough to say that it was not so entirely insufficient as to warrant us in disturbing the verdict.

There are some exceptions to rulings of the court. They are referred to very concisely in appellant’s brief; and the reference to some of them is so meager that the labor is thrown on the court of exploring the transcript to discover what the nature of the alleged error is; as, for instance, “Proposed instructions marked ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D’ (Tr., fols. 606 to 608) correctly state the law of the case, and the court’s refusal to give them is assigned as error.” However, we have examined the various parts of the transcript referred to as showing errors, and find that most of them concern matters too trivial to be of any importance or to need special mention. A few of them will be noticed.

The exceptions to instructions XLVII, XLVIII, and XLIX are not well taken. They are correct statements of the law as to insanity and intoxication,—as appellant admits them to be, in the abstract,—and they were applicable to the evidence in the case. The proposed instructions “B,” “C,” and “D,” asked by appellant, were properly refused by the court. The testimony of the boy Homer Dahnken, nine years old, was admitted over appellant’s objection that he was too young to

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testify; but that was a question for the trial court, who had the boy before it, to determine, and there is nothing to show that there was any error or abuse of discretion in the premises. It was not error to admit the testimony of the witness Leavens as to a conversation which he heard between the appellant and the deceased shortly before the homicide. The fact that there had been some prior conversations which the witness had not heard might affect the weight of the testimony, but not its admissibility. There is nothing in the objection to the testimony of the witness Buckner.