People v. Hite

GRAY, C.

The defendant appeals from a judgment convicting him of an assault with intent to commit robbery and from an order denying him a new trial.

1. The principal point urged on this appeal is, that the verdict is not supported by the evidence; that there is no evidence to show that defendant intended to rob the prosecuting witness, Howard.

There is evidence in the case to warrant the following statement of facts: The defendant met Howard for the first time, at one o’clock on the morning of the tenth day of June, 1901, in Hudson’s saloon, in the town of Red Bluff. During the next two hours the defendant, Howard, and a man named German had several drinks together in that saloon. German and the prosecuting witness had also met for the first time on that night. The defendant and German had been acquainted for several days prior thereto. At three o’clock on said morning, Howard left said saloon, with the view of going to bed at the Red Bluff Hotel, where he was registered. He was followed by German and the defendant, though he seems not to have been aware that he was followed until near the hotel, when German and the defendant approached him, and defendant asked him where he was going, to which he replied, “Going to the Red Bluff Hotel, to go to bed,” whereupon defendant or German remarked that they would take care of bfm, and each took him by an arm, and after trying the door of the barroom of the hotel and finding it locked, they shoved

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Howard across the sidewalk toward the street, and the defendant struck him on the hack part of the top of the head with some kind of an instrument which left an abrasion and a lump as big as a man’s fist. Upon the delivery of this blow, all three of the parties seem to have gone headlong into the street, Howard falling on the bottom and the others being above him. Howard immediately raised an outcry of “Murder;” “Highway robbery,” and “Police.” The defendant and German immediately fled from the scene. An officer, who was watching the proceedings from a point of concealment, gave chase and ran by where the defendant stood in the street in the shadow of some trees, recognized defendant, and, as he knew him and knew where he worked, went on in pursuit of German. Some fifteen minutes later he returned to the stable where defendant worked, and found him hitching up a horse for a patron of the stable. The prosecuting witness had about twenty-five dollars in gold and silver, and had paid for the drinks at the saloon once, and, as the barkeeper testifies, had rattled the money in his pocket in presence of defendant. He missed none of this money. On this evidence, it was the peculiar province of the jury to determine the question of the intention with which this violent and unlooked-for assault was made upon a half-drunken stranger at three o'clock in the morning. This is the time and this is the way in which robberies are sometimes committed, and we are not greatly surprised under the circumstances that the prosecuting witness thought himself in the hands of robbers and cried out “Murder,” “Highway robbery,” etc.; nor is it a matter of wonder that the jury drew the same inference and the trial judge reached the same conclusion.