Sansome v. Myres

Thornton, J. This is an application for a writ of mandate commanding the Honorable B. F. Myres, judge of the superior court of the county of Placer, to settle a bill of exceptions in the case of People v. Sansome. San-some, the petitioner for the writ here, was indicted by the grand jury of Placer County for the crime of robbery, and tried on this indictment before the superior court of the same county, the Honorable B. F. Myres, presiding. He was convicted and sentenced, and at the proper time a motion for a new trial was made. This motion was made on the grounds that the court had misdirected the jury in matters of law, and erred in the decision of matters of law arising during the course of the trial, and that the verdict was contrary to the evidence. In due time counsel for the defendant, Sansome, prepared a draught of a bill of exceptions, which was regularly presented, on notice to the district attorney, to the judge for settlement. The judge refused to settle the bill presented, on the ground that it was inaccurate, and in many respects untrue, and contained but a meager and partial statement of the facts and proceedings leading up to and connected with and upon which the rulings of the court were had, that are complained of, and also a mere defective skeleton of the testimony and evidence submitted to the jury, and upon which they reached their verdict of guilty. To the alternative writ issued in this case, the judge has filed an answer, in which he states the same reasons for not settling the bill of exceptions, and amplifies them. The judge in his answer says: “That to have presented fully and fairly all the matters and things and facts connected with and leading up to the rulings of the court and connected with the trial, as tending to show error, it would have been. [355]necessary for the court to have added amendments to that part of the bill of exceptions, relating to such errors, of about twenty pages of manuscript, and in fact, the matters were so presented in said bill of exceptions that the only proper way would have been to have drawn an entirely new bill as a substitute; and the testimony of the seven witnesses for the people, as set out in the proposed statement, was condensed to four and a half pages of very coarsely written manuscript, while the testimony for the people, as given by the witnesses, covered over 115 pages of type-writing, as actually written by the court reporter under the order of the court, for the use of the petitioner’s attorney; and in fact contained very little, and in some instances none, of the material testimony as given by the witnesses for the people; that to have made that part of the statement a fair presentation of the testimony upon which the jury found their verdict would have required amendments covering at least fifty pages of manuscript; and this court would have to have written, or ordered the same written at its dictation, such amendments, and in fact would have had to draught an entirely new bill of exceptions and statement.” The judge further states that none of the testimony of Captain A. W. Stone, so far as it related to the commission of the offense, and as tending to connect the petitioner with the commission of the crime, was set out in the bill of exceptions, although the same covered over fifty pages of type-writing, nor was any part of the three statements claimed to have been made by the petitioner at three different times, and to be contradictory and inculpatory in their nature, given in the bill, although such statements were more than ten pages in length of type-writing; that the testimony for the defense, as set out in the bill presented, was partial, and did not contain, but rather omitted, all those matters which tended to criminate defendant, or to show that such evidence might not be true, or was given under a mistaken recollection of