Court Opinion

ID: 9704360
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:32:57.341249+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:16:35.041278
License: Public Domain

M. J. Kelly, J.
(dissenting). On March 19, 1968, the defendant pumped seven shots into his 25-year-old wife in the bedroom of their home on Lesure Avenue in the City of Detroit at about 6 o’clock in the evening. The police arrived about 9 o’clock in the evening and searched the living room, both bedrooms and the basement for a weapon. They found none. The woman’s body lying face down in the den, head toward the living room and feet toward the bedroom, was clothed only in bra and panties. Defendant told the police and neighbors that he had called his wife from work, asked her to bring a bowling shirt and she didn’t. He had come home in anger and his wife wasn’t there. He waited for her and when she arrived they had an altercation. He testified at trial that she lunged at him with a knife in her hand and he backed up fast enough to get out of the way. He then testified that after he shot her:
"She still had the knife in her hand and she looked at me and I took the knife out of her hand and called the police and told them what had happened. Going through the kitchen, I realized the knife was still in my hand and I throwed it into the oven and I left out the door and I stopped at Mrs. Diamond’s house and told her that the back door was open and that the police would come in there and I proceeded back to my car, got in the car and I don’t know exactly where I was going, but I wound up at the gas station.”
The nine wounds on the body were caused when *475the defendant fired a seven-shot automatic by pulling the trigger, releasing, pulling again and again repeatedly, until the weapon was entirely emptied. Two of the bullets penetrated parts of her body twice.
The wife did not wound the husband. The blood on the knife was the wife’s blood. If she had been holding a knife apparently the blood from her own wounds dripped onto it. The jury certainly did not have to believe that she was holding a knife.
At any rate the statement defendant made to witnesses Willie and Teresa Cannon that:
"He said he had an argument and he was about to leave the house and she stabbed him, at him, and he got his gun and he fired.”
was proven untrue in part. She did not stab him. She may have stabbed at him.
Deciding this case on the question of the precedential value of People v Lenkevich, 394 Mich 117; 229 NW2d 298 (1975), as urged by the defendant I consider totally inappropriate. Deciding the case as the majority does on the precedential value of People v McGrandy, 9 Mich App 187; 156 NW2d 48 (1967), I consider inappropriate for two reasons.
First because had this appeal been properly processed, the instruction in question could certainly have been considered at least arguably correct under the analysis of the Court of Appeals in its unpublished per curiam opinion in People v Lenkevich, Docket No. 12275, released March 22, 1973. Not precedentially but logically. In other words á panel of our Court came to the conclusion that the same instruction given by the trial judge in People v Arthur McDaniels, Jr. in the Record*476er’s Court did not require reversal where not objected to at trial.
The Recorder’s Court Judge in Lenkevich instructed:
"And, third, that there must have been no way open whereby she could have retreated, as it appeared to her at the time of the stabbing to a place of safety and thus avoid the conflict.” 394 Mich at 120.
Does that impel the conclusion that the trial judge below erred reversibly by not giving sua sponte the now correct Cardozo instruction quoted by Justice Coleman in People v Lenkevich, supra, at 121? I would hold that it emphatically does not.
Furthermore this whole area of appellate review should not be lightly invoked. The so-called inherent power rule should be exercised sparingly, under unusual circumstances, and only to cure manifest and serious error. People v Mack, 64 Mich App 587, 595; 236 NW2d 523 (1975) (Judge Kelly dissenting). I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt reading this record that the jury considered the self-defense claims of this defendant as makeweight and frivolous. The jury was properly charged on both second-degree murder and manslaughter. There was no objection to the charge on self-defense.
The second reason I would affirm I have recently written to in People v Sizemore, 69 Mich App 672; 245 NW2d 159 (1976):
"I think the critical question on the [People v] Crittle [390 Mich 367; 212 NW2d 196 (1973)], issue is the failure to object. Crittle was written in November of 1973 and this trial took place in February of 1974. It is one thing to say that the Crittle error constituted manifest injustice and required reversal without an *477objection. It is quite another thing to say that a later case involving the same error mandates reversal. That would require the assumption that the defense attorney, the prosecutor and the trial judge did not read the Supreme Court advance sheets and were not bound by its released decisions. One can ponder the public’s reaction to such an appellate court holding in the beleaguered criminal justice system. We should not provide such an appellate parachute.”
The same logic applies in this case. McGrandy vtas published in December of 1967 and this trial took place three years later. With the proliferation of opinions from this Court we are deluding ourselves if we hold to every practitioner and every judge knowledge of a volume of opinions containing precedent which I am ready to say bench and bar in large majority do not even read, let alone totally recall. It is folly for us to zero in on points of law which have not been brought to the trial judge’s attention or instructions to charge which have not been requested or instructions which have been approved by trial counsel and to predicate reversible error sometimes many years later.
This defendant had a fair trial, he was well represented and he was very properly jury convicted. We should not in the appellate tower of theoretical perspective impute ubiquitous knowledge of existing precedent to the bench and bar of the state by historical hindsight.
I would affirm.