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104 N.C. 868

State v. Wilson

Supreme Court of North Carolina

Decided September 15, 1889

Supreme Court of North Carolina · decided 1889-09-15

Homicide — Murder—insanity—Drunkenness—Judge’s Charge. This was an Indictment, charging the prisoner with the Murder of Thos. Edge, tried at Spring Term, 1889, of Yancey Superior Court, Armfield, /., presiding. John W. Wilson, a witness for the State, testified: “I am a cousin of the prisoner. On the 22d of last September I was at Edge’s store, in Yancey County, at a shooting-match for a turkey belonging to prisoner. Deceased was there.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“The jury should see the issues, stripped of all redundant and confusing matters, and in as clear a light as practicable.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Irvin v. . R. R.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1889-09-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently August 1992

16 state decisions

70188918901900191019201930194019501960197019801990decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Merrimon, C. J.:

¶1The Court very properly declined to give the jury the special instructions prayed for by the prisoner, because there was no evidence produced on the trial tending to prove that he slew the deceased by accident, nor was there evidence, in any aspect of it, that could mitigate the offence to manslaughter. It was clearly a case of willful and unprovoked murder, unless the prisoner was insane at the time of the homicide. The deceased had given him no legal provocation — indeed, no provocation at all. Pie said to the deceased just before he fired the fatal shot, “You have sworn, or told, damn lies on me, and I am going to kill *873you for it,” and, very shortly afterwards, a witness said to him he had killed the deceased, and he replied, “Yes, I know I have killed him; I did it because he swore a damn lie against me, and if it is right to hang me, let them hang me.” This was evidence of motive and express malice.

¶2The Court should never give the jury instructions based upon a state of, facts not presented by some reasonable view of the evidence produced on the trial, nor upon a supposed state of facts. Such instructions are not pertinent, and they generally tend to mislead or confuse the jury, more or less. The jury should see the issues, stripped of all redundant and confusing matters, and in as clear a light as practicable. If such impertinent instructions should prejudice the prisoner, he wrould be entitled to a new trial; if they should prejudice the prosecution, there would be no remedy. State v. Collins, 8 Ired., 407; State v. Lambert, 93 N. C., 618.

¶3The evidence tended thoroughly to prove that the prisoner was not an insane person, and, particularly, that he was not insane at the time he slew thé deceased, but the Court gave him the full benefit of the evidence offered and received, tending — not strongly — to prove insanity. The instructions given the jury in this aspect of the case were very favorable to the prisoner—certainly they were not such as he could justly complain of. Drunkenness, and mere drunken excitement and rage, constitute no excuse for crime. State v. Potts, 100 N. C., 457.

¶4Affirmed.

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