State v. . Merritt

Decided January 5, 1867

Supreme Court of North Carolina · decided 1867-01-05

Assault, with intent to kill, tried before his Honor, Barnes, J., at Fall Term, 1866, of Duplin. The indictment charged that both of the defendants made an assault upon Lipman Aarons, with an intent to kill him. The evidence showed that whilst Aarons and his wife, daughter and son, were sitting one night upon the front piazza of his house, during the fall of 1866, a gun was fired at them, the shot passing between them, and lodging in the wall of the house.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1867-01-05

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently November 1949

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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Reads, J.

¶1 There was no specific instruction prayed for,, and no specific exception taken below or in this court. We-are therefore left to collect from the whole of the Judge’s charge and from the record, whether there was any error.

¶2 Only two questions seem to be involved:

¶3 1. Whether an indiscriminate assault upon several is an assault upon each individual ? Very clearly it is.

¶4 2. Whether when a gun is fired by one defendant, andl the other is present aiding and abetting, the shooting may be charged to have been done by both ? The act of one is-the act of both, and it may be so charged.

¶5 Let it be certified that there is no error.

¶6 Per Curiam. There is no error