Court Opinion

ID: 9680252
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:27:36.710226+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:27.259527
License: Public Domain

George Rose Smith, Justice, concurring. I do not find the appellant’s third point as troublesome as the majority opinion implies. It is virtually a physical impossibility that a bullet, traveling at several hundred feet a second, could have picked up a bit of human hair, carried it through the air, and left it on a wall in such a condition that the hair could be identified. If by some miraculous chance the hairlike object could have been identified as Lloyd’s hair, that would simply have corroborated Lloyd’s statement and have been of no benefit to the defendant. If the object could not have been identified, that would have been the natural and inevitable expectancy, again with no benefit to the defendant. Thus the trial court’s denial of a mistrial was so clearly right that I think a contrary ruling would have been a gross abuse of discretion.