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27 S.W.2d 211

Clark v. State

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas · decided 1930-04-09

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1930-04-09

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently February 2011

5 state decisions

20193019401950196019701980199020002010decided

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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LATTIMORE, J.

¶1Conviction for murder; punishment, thirty-five years in the penitentiary.

¶2The learned trial judge in this case instructed the jury that if they believed the accused was actuated by malice aforethought, they might punish him by death or imprisonment in the penitentiary for any term of years not less than two. The indictment in the case did not justify or warrant such a charge. There was no allegation therein that the killing was upon malice aforethought. The penalty inflicted is very much in excess of the maximum allowed, where the killing was not upon malice aforethought. Unless there be such allegation in the indictment, a penalty such as this would be unwarranted, and an instruction to the jury as above outlined would be submitting to them a penalty greatly in excess of that pei'mitted by law where there was no malice aforethought. If a greater penalty than five years be desired, a new indictment should be returned.

¶3The judgment will be reversed, and the cause remanded.

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