State v. Hagert

Ohio Supreme Court

Decided December 27, 1944

Ohio Supreme Court · decided 1944-12-27

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Decided 1944-12-27

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently October 1984

3 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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Zimmerman, J.,

¶1 dissenting. The defendant in this case was so patently guilty of the horrible crime with which he was charged that the error discussed, if it was really error, becomes insignificant. Section 13449-5, General Code, should be applied and the judgment of the Court of Appeals affirmed.

Weygandt, C. J., and Turner, J., concur in the foregoing dissenting opinion.

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Case posture

Posture: APPEAL from the Court of Appeals of Cuyahoga county. On August 12, 1943, the defendant, Henry William Hagert, then 17 years of age, shot and killed Charles and James Collins, twin brothers, 12 years of age. Very shortly after the offense was committeed the defendant was taken into custody for kidnapping a boy named Buchanan. At that time it was not known that the Collins boys were dead, but their disappearance had been reported to police headquarters. The defendant, upon being interrogated, admitted the kidnapping of the Buchanan boy and then, regarding a pistol found upon his person, said: The gun that you just took away from me is the one I killed the other two boys with. The defendant then led the police to a woods near the dead end of Sadler road in Bay Village, and there the bodies of the twin brothers were found. They had been shot through the head. From the conversation of the defendant it was learned that about 11 o'clock on the morning of the crime he was driving his automobile east on a street in Rocky River, a municipality located west of Cleveland. These boys appeared to be thumbing a ride. The defendant turned his automobile around, went back, picked them up, drove them to Bay Village along Lake Road, turned down a side road, took the boys into the woods and shot them at the place where their bodies were found. The defendant was indicted on a charge of murder in the first degree for killing James Collins. Between the time of the indictment and trial a preliminary hearing was had for the purpose of determining whether the defendant was sane or insane, and a jury, empaneled for that purpose, returned a verdict finding him then sane. Thereupon the case went to trial on the indictment and the defendant was found guilty without a recommendation of mercy, and sentenced to death. The defense made was that the defendant was insane at the time of the commission of the offense. The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment. This court having allowed a motion for leave to appeal, the cause is here for review.

Source: CourtListener

Court

Ohio Supreme Court

Parallel citations

58 N.E.2d 764
29 OhioOp. 454