Court Opinion

ID: 9587509
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:23:00.843731+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:28.620481
License: Public Domain

Carlisle, Judge,
dissenting. I dissent from the ruling made in division 2 of the opinion and from the judgment of reversal.
The rule is well established in this State that “on a prosecution for a particular crime, evidence which in any manner shows or tends to show that the accused has committed another crime wholly distinct, independent, and separate from that for which he is on trial, even though it be a crime of the same sort, is irrelevant and inadmissible, unless there be shown some logical connection between the two from which it can be said that proof of the one tends to establish the other.” Bacon v. State, 209 Ga. 261 (71 S. E. 2d 615). There are, however, certain exceptions to1 this rule. One of these exceptions is where knowledge, motive, intent, bad faith, or other matters which depend *327upon a person’s state of mind are involved as a material element in the particular criminal offense for which the defendant is on trial. Lee v. State, 8 Ga. App. 413 (3) (69 S. E. 310). In such cases where the defendant has engaged in a course of conduct at or about the same time as -the act in question, evidence of such other acts, conduct or transactions, is admissible to illustrate the state of mind of the defendant when it can be said that such evidence may reasonably tend to prove such state of mind.
In the instant case, I think that evidence of the transaction objected to as complained of in special ground 2, together with other evidence relating to the defendant’s conduct toward the prosecutrix, and his treatment of her in coming to her apartment and creating a disturbance and assaulting her on two or three separate occasions prior to the occasion for which he was indicted, to which evidence no exception has been made for consideration by this court, tended to illustrate the jealous state of the defendant’s mind and tended to show motive for the assault on the prosecutrix on the occasion in question. As was said by Judge Powell in Lee v. State, 8 Ga. App. 413, 417, supra, “Intent, good faith, motive, and other such matters relating to the state of a person’s mind are usually not easily susceptible of direct proof. But frequently the state of mind accompanying the doing of an act is illustrated by other acts of a similar nature done by the defendant in such a way as to indicate a general practice or course of conduct, or as to display motive, knowledge, intent, good faith, bad faith, and a variety of other such things. The relevancy being patent, and other methods of proof being difficult or inadequate, the weight of expediency is in favor of admitting the proof of these other acts, though they themselves constitute crimes. It is not the fact of their being crimes or of their showing the defendant’s bad character that furnishes the probative value essential to their admission in evidence. It is their distinct relevancy to the particular case on trial and the special need for the testimony which justify the admission of the evidence.”
I think it can be said that the act of the defendant in assaulting a perfect stranger in a public place under the circumstances *328related by the witness, and where the defendant was shown to have said to the stranger, “I will show you whose girl you are talking to,” logically and reasonably tended to illustrate the jealous state of the defendant’s mind and that it was admissible for this purpose.
I aril authorized to say that Gardner, P. J., joins in this dissent.