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66 Miss. 446

Shubert v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided April 15, 1889

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1889-04-15

From the circuit court of Leflore county. Hon. C. H. Campbell, Judge. Appellant was indicted for the murder of James Smith, and was convicted of manslaughter. A special venire of thirty jurors was drawn and summoned, but the list of the venire served upon the prisoner with the copy of the indictment contained only twenty-nine names.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“"It is a mistake to suppose that the prisoner has a vested right to a particular person of the special venire. The statutes providing for a special venire and giving the prisoner a copy of the indictment and list of the special venire summoned, are designed to secure an impartial jury to try him; and where that is accomplished no ground for complaint exists."”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Gallion v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1889-04-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently April 1981

9 state decisions

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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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Campbell, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2The motion to quash the special venire because the name of one <of the thirty drawn and summoned was omitted from the copy furnished the prisoner was properly overruled. The omission was a mere inadvertence, and no harm was done the prisoner by the action of the court in the matter. The person whose name was left off the copy given the prisoner was set aside by the court, and a jury was selected from the other twenty-nine men of the .special venire, and without an exhaustion of the peremptory challenges allowed the prisoner by law.

¶3It is a mistake to suppose that the prisoner has a vested right to a particular person of the special venire. The statutes providing for a special venire and giving the prisoner a copy of the indictment and list of the special venire summoned are designed to secure an impartial jury to try him, and where that is accomplished no ground for complaint exists.

¶4The instructions gi ven at the instance of the state are free from objection. All that can be urged against the 10th is that it is another instance of the vain attempt to do the impossible, i. e., to define that indefinable thing, reasonable doubt, all efforts at which seem to us calculated only to confuse and mislead.

¶5The 7th instruction asked by the prisoner was rightly refused, because it coupled the preceding difficulty between the parties with *451the killing in a manner unwarranted by the evidence, and because all that is proper in that instruction is contained in another given for the accused.

¶6The 9th instruction asked by the accused was properly refused because it invokes a doubt upon a doubt as entitling to an acquittal, and likewise claims it as a right, if the testimony of defendant “ tends to show him innocent of the charge and the jury are uncertain whether such testimony is true or not.” Surely, this is not the law.

¶7The defendant cannot complain of the failure of the court to define manslaughter, as he did not seek to obtain any definition of it.

¶8'Affirmed.

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