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208 Ga. 511

67 S.E.2d 578

Coleman v. State

Supreme Court of Georgia

Decided November 14, 1951

Supreme Court of Georgia · decided 1951-11-14

Relies on Cumer & Co. v. Allen · Hamilton v. State · Dotson v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1951-11-14

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently December 1983

8 state decisions

601951196019701980decided

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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Duckworth, Chief Justice.

¶1 1. Since there was evideneé to the effect that the killing charged in the indictment was accidental, the court should have charged, without request, the law relating to misfortune or accident as stated in Code § 26-404. Failure to so charge was, as contended in special ground eight of the amended motion for new-trial, error requiring a reversal. Jordan v. State, 154 Ga. 390 (114 S. E. 349); Batchelor v. State, 162 Ga. 7 (132 S. E. 624); Willingham v. State, 169 Ga. 142 (149 S. E. 887); Hill v. State, 169 Ga. 455 (150 S. E. 587); Patterson v. State, 181 Ga. 698 (184 S. E. 309); Etheridge v. State, 187 Ga. 30 (199 S. E. 185); Adkins v. State, 198 Ga. 720 (32 S. E. 2d, 768).

¶2 2. The other special grounds of the amended motion for new trial complain of other portions of the charge or the failure to charge, none of which are meritorious. Unless reviewed and overruled, the decisions in Comer & Co. v. Allen, 72 Ga. 1, Hamilton v. State, 129 Ga. 747 (59 S. E. 803), Dotson v. State, 136 Ga. 243 (71 S. E. 164), Yeates v. Yeates, 162 Ga. 153 (132 S. E. 768), would require a ruling that the ground complaining of the statement in the charge on justifiable homicide, that, “as I understand from counsel” justifiable homicide is involved, is without merit. However, a new trial is ordered on another ground, and we intimate no opinion as to what our decision would be on a review of those decisions for the purpose of overruling them. Certainly such a statement can never have any beneficial place in a charge and ought never to be made.

¶3 3. The general grounds are not ruled upon, since on another trial the evidence may not be the same, and we would not wish any ruling of ours to prejudice the case on the sufficiency of the evidence.

¶4 Judgment reversed.

All the Justices concur.
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