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89 Miss. 773

Johnson v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided November 15, 1906

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1906-11-15

From: the circuit court of Pike county. Hon. Moyse H. Wilkinson, Judge. Johnson, the appellant, and three others, were indicted for the murder of Harriet Caston; there was a severance, and appellant was separately tried, convicted of the murder, and sentenced to suffer death, from which conviction and sentence he appealed to the supreme court.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“clearly inadmissible, under the doctrine as settled in this state.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including 547 So. 2d 42 - Dunn v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1906-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently March 2003

10 state decisions

3019061910192019301940195019601970198019902000decided

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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Whitfield, C. J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2The confessions detailed in this case by White, Helmer and Thompson are clearly inadmissible, under the doctrine as settled in this state.

¶3This error was emphasized by the refusal of the court to give the following instruction: “If you believe, from the evidence, that the confession, if you believe there was a confession, was brought about by fear, duress, intimidation, or by the hope or promise of reward, or that such confessions, if there were any, were untrue, then you may disregard them altogether.” This charge meant that if the jury believed, as to certain confessions, that they had been obtained by the hope of reward, or by fear, or that they were untrue, they might disregard them altogether. The belief, if it existed in' the minds of the jury, that confessions had been obtained by fear or hope, or were untrue, was, of course, intended to be distributiyely applied to those confessions as to which these things might be believed. It was fatal error to refuse this charge on the vital point in the case.

¶4We call attention to the fact, in order that the charge may be corrected hereafter, that the charge given for the state was erroneous in omitting the word “feloniously.”

¶5Reversed and remanded.

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