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171 Ala. 37

Gray v. State

Supreme Court of Alabama

Decided April 18, 1911

Supreme Court of Alabama · decided 1911-04-18

Heard before Hon. S. L. Weaver. Richard Gray was convicted of murder in the second degree and he appeals. Counsel discuss the method of drawing the jury in this case and also the constitutionality of the jury laws, and cite authority in support of their contention but in view of what is said in the opinion, it is not deemed necessary to here set them out.

Relies on Kennedy v. State · Holland v. Fairbanks-Morse & Co.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Reversed and remanded · Decided 1911-04-18

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently August 1979

5 state decisions

201911192019301940195019601970decided

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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MAYFIELD, J.

¶1Defendant was convicted of murder in the second degree, and sentenced to the penitentiary for a period of 25 years.

¶2The evidence was without dispute that defendant killed deceased by shooting him with a pistol. There was little dispute, if any, that deceased had cut defend*38ant, and ivas cutting or attempting to cut him, when defendant fired the fatal shot. The evidence was in conflict as to who provoked the difficulty.

¶3The trial court refused to the defendant the following charge: “I charge you, gentlemen of the jury, if the defendant shot under á bona fide belief that his life was in danger, and had under all the circumstances reasonable cause to believe that he was in imminent danger at the moment the shot was fired, it would be immaterial whether there was such actual danger or not.” Its refusal was reversible error. This identical charge has been several times held to be proper, and its refusal to be error, when the charge was not inappropriate and not abstract. It was a proper charge under the facts of this case, and its refusal error. Kennedy v. State, 140 Ala. 1, 37 South. 90; Fantroy v. State, 166 Ala. 198, 51 South. 931.

¶4Reversed and remanded.

Simpson, McClellan, and Somerville, JJ., concur.
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