Court Opinion

ID: 9857096
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 07:15:26.114216+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:38:00.245672
License: Public Domain

*164William J. Brennan, Jr., J.
(dissenting). I vote to reverse and remand for a new trial because I find substantial merit in defendant’s contention that the charge was “an unlawful direction to the jury to find a first-degree murder verdict” and improperly invaded “the province of the jury.”
The jury was instructed that there is a “difference between an accidental shooting done unintentionally, and a shooting done with deliberation and premeditation and intentionally”; and also that if the killing “was done in a sudden transport of passion or in the heat of passion, and with provocation, it is manslaughter,” but if “done in the heat of passion without provocation, it is second degree murder.” If the trial judge had stopped at that point and had left to the jury the choice of the proper verdict dependent upon their findings from the controverted facts, I would see no error. He did not do that. His charge continued: “But if you believe that the defendant reached for the cartridge, loaded the cartridge [the gun?] and aimed and shot and killed the deceased, then you have a right to believe from the evidence that the killing was done willfully, with deliberation and with premeditation.”
Yet the interval during which the defendant “reached in the closet, got the gun out, loaded it and shot” was seconds at most. The defendant and the deceased were having a bitter quarrel at the time. Concededly a willful, deliberate and premeditated intention .to kill the deceased could have been formed bj1, defendant in even that short time. It was equally inferable, however, that the killing was done in a sudden transport of passion induced by the quarrel, and if that was the case the homicide was an offense no greater than murder in the second degree.
The jurors thought that, or at least were uncertain whether, they had been instructed to bring in a verdict of first-degree murder if they found merely that the defendant “reached for the cartridge, loaded the cartridge [the gun ?] and aimed and shot and killed the deceased.” They made their quandary clear to the trial judge when, after six and one-half hours of *165deliberating, they returned and asked, “Does the fact he shot her as the results (sic) of an argument alter the .first degree murder verdict?” Certainly that question required an answer that the crime was not higher than murder in the lesser degree if the jury found that it was committed in a sudden transport of passion engendered by the quarreling. The judge, however, merely told the jury, “I don’t feel I can give a categorical answer of yes or no to that,” and then re-read lengthy excerpts from his charge dealing in most general terms with the distinctions among the several classes of homicidal crimes.
Heher, J., joins in this opinion.
For affirmance — Chief Justice Vanderbilt, and Justices Ollphant, Wacheneeld, Burling and Jacobs — 5.
For reversal — Justices Heher and Brennan — 2.