People v. Miles

Sharpstein, J.: The appellant was indicted for murder, and convicted of manslaughter. He moved upon a bill of exceptions for a new trial, which was denied, and the Court sentenced him to imprisonment in the State Prison for the term of seven years.

[208]There was evidence introduced on the trial which tended to prove that, thirty or forty minutes before the homicide, the deceased and the defendant, in their respective wagons, each accompanied by two other persons, met upon the highway in the vicinity of their homes. The deceased and his friends were in a covered wagon, the latter occupying the front seat, and the former sitting upon a scat in the rear of the wagon. There was a gun in the wagon, and when the two wagons were nearly abreast, the deceased got out of the wagon, seized the gun, and fired at the defendant, but did not hit him. The horses attached to the wagon in which the defendant was riding became frightened, and started to run. The defendant, however, managed to discharge a gun, which he had, twice at the deceased without effect.

The defendant and his party, of which his brother was one, returned to the latter’s house and put up their team. The defendant, armed with a rifle, started to go in the direction of his own house by a route which would take him by the house of the deceased. The latter, soon afterward, with his friends, returned to his house, and drove into a corral, and while they were unharnessing his team, he was shot by the defendant, and expired before medical or surgical aid could reach him. There was some evidence of a hostile meeting of the defendant and the deceased on the highway only a few days before the occurrences above narrated, in which they assailed each other with other than deadly weapons. The defense endeavored at the trial to make it appear that the deceased had, on several occasions, in the presence of several persons, threatened to kill the defendant, and that those threats had been communicated to him by the persons who heard them. The defendant testified that, at the time of firing the fatal shot, he saw the deceased in the act, as he (defendant) construed it, of taking his gun from the wagon for the purpose of shooting at the defendant. Among the instructions which' the Court gave to the jury was the following :

“ If it appears to your entire satisfaction from all the evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the alleged deceased (Ananias Niles) was shot from behind by the defendant, and that thd defendant at the time of the shooting was concealed behind a