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106 Miss. 353

James v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1913

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1913-10-15

Hon. MoNuoe MoCluRb, Judge. Lockhart James was convicted of murder and appeals. The facts are fully stated in the opinion of the court. The jury might well, under the testimony, have convicted the appellant of manslaughter under either section 1236 or 1237 of the Code of 1906. Now, if this is true, the failure of the court below to instruct the jury upon the question of manslaughter was a fatal error. The direct question was presented in Jobtson v. State, 75 Miss. 635.

Relies on L. J. Alford Lumber Co. v. Ragland

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1913-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently August 2016

6 state decisions

2019131920193019401950196019701980199020002010decided

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.

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Reed, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2Appellant was indicted for murder, tried and convicted, and sentenced to the penitentiary for life.

¶3It is in the assignment of errors, and earnestly argued by appellant’s counsel, that the court erred in failing to grant an instruction defining manslaughter and informing the jury that appellant might be convicted of that offense.

¶4No such instruction was asked for by either side in the trial of the case. We have decided recently, in the ease of Johnson v. State, 63 So. 338, that, where appellant has not presented a written instruction on manslaughter, with the request that it be given, the failure by the court to give such instruction will not be deemed error upon appellant’s complaint. In the opinion in that case we said: “Under the system of judicial procedure in. Mississippi, it is not in the province of the juclg’e to give instructions to the jury, unless ¡one of the parties request him to do so, and present'to him in writing the desired instruction. He is not permitted to instruct the jury at his own instance. Having failed to present a written instruction on manslaughter to the judge, with .the request that it be given, appellant cannot now be heard' to complain that she has not received the benefit of such instruction.”

¶5•• We find-no error in the trial of the present case.

¶6Affirmed.

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