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127 Miss. 492

Dye v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1921

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1921-10-15

On suggestion of error. The Avord felonious is defined by Webster as meaning malignant, malicious, villainous, traitorous and perfidious. Section 1345, HemingAvay’s Code, Section 1578, Code of 1906, defines felony as any violation of the law punishable by death or confinement in the penitentiary. Felonious homicide is the offense of killing a human creature Avithout excuse or justification.

Relies on Hawthorne v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Suggestion overruled · Decided 1921-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently June 2003

13 state decisions

50192119301940195019601970198019902000decided

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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Sykes, P. J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2The judgment of the lower court in this case was affirmed without a written opinion. In a suggestion of error it is earnestly insisted that the judgment should have been reversed and the cause remanded because of the following-instruction granted to the state: “The court instructs the jury for the state that the term ‘malice aforethought’ as used in these instructions, means the felonious design or purpose to effect the death of the person killed, and that it is sufficient in law if such purpose or design existed immediately before or at the time of the killing.”

¶3It is true that this instruction is erroneous, and is not a correct definition of “malice aforethought.” In this state “malice aforethought” is equivalent to “premeditated design,” or “deliberate design.” Hawthorne v. State, 58 Miss. 788. A felonious design is not the same as a premeditated or a deliberate design.

¶4One may have a felonious design to kill and yet kill in the heat of passion. If there had been any of the elements of manslaughter in this case a very serious question would have been presented, but the defendant was either guilty of murder or nothing. There were no elements of manslaughter in the case, and the question of manslaughter was properly not submitted to the jury. Consequently we are of the opinion that no prejudicial error was committed by the giving of this instruction.

¶5The suggestion of error is overruled.

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