Hunt v. State

Decided October 15, 1914

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1914-10-15

Hon. W. A. Alcorn, Judge. Will Hunt was convicted of murder and appeals. Appellant was convicted of the murder of his wife, and sentenced to the penitentiary for life. There 'were no witnesses to the killing except the defendant himself. Immediately, after the gunshot appellant gave the alarm that his wife had shot herself. She was found with the wound entering her head, the shot having taken an upward range.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1914-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently September 1998

6 state decisions

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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Cook, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2We have carefully gone over all the evidence in this case, and we can find no single circumstance that points to the defendant’s guilt with that degree of certainty which the law demands. Taking all of the circumstances *589together,'there is no legal proof of guilt. The most that can he said for the state’s case is that there were some suspicious circumstances proven against the defendant.

¶3It is not the policy of the law to punish individuals for crime when the evidence fails to prove that a crime was-, .committed. The evidence here fails in this particular, and the judgment of the trial court is reversed and the-defendant discharged.

¶4Reversed..