Court Opinion

ID: 9740281
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:31:40.231993+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:17.259372
License: Public Domain

O’Hara, J.
(for affirmance). I adhere to the position I took in my dissent when this case was first passed upon by this Court.
*494The precise point of disagreement with my colleagues in their somewhat revised opinion after remand by the Supreme Court is this. The majority holds:
"If any evidence of intent to rob is to be found in the record of this case, it must come from the expression, 'Old man, this is it’, made by an armed man.
"Keeping in mind we find sufficient evidence of an armed assault, we find that the expression, 'Old man, this is it’, with no more is not sufficient evidence from which a jury can find a specific intent to rob.”
I hold it is.
I feel it is also necessary to comment on this portion of the majority opinion.
"The expression 'this is it’, as stated in our initial opinion, could have signaled a number of intentions. Evidence of this fact can be found in a report by the United Press International, as reported in The Detroit Free Press on Monday, August 23, 1971, of the bloody escape attempt in which six persons were killed at San Quentin Prison when a pistol was apparently smuggled in to Black revolutionary George Jackson by a visitor. We quote the following paragraph from the report:
" 'Warden Louis Nelson said Jackson was being searched at his cell about 3 p.m. after receiving a visitor when he suddenly pulled the pistol and said, "This is it.” ’
"The question we ask ourselves is: 'Can we allow a jury to find a specific intent to rob from use of a phrase such as was used here, as well as in a prison break that did not involve a robbery’?”
The analogy, if there is any, escapes me. I respectfully point out that the phrase was not born at the time of the escape attempt.
It was attributed to Marines in World War II, as they boarded their landing craft to storm an enemy-held beach (but I must confess I did not hear *495anyone in my L.C.V.P. at Okinawa employ it). I have heard it used triumphantly by a successful searcher seeking out an elusive short circuit, and by a judge who has just located a case he was trying to find to support a position he had taken contrary to that of his colleagues. After all, perhaps it must be as Humpty Dumpty said:
"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”1
It is my view that it was for the jury, as a cross-section of the community, to say what the ungrateful defendant in this case meant when he directed the words to the good Samaritan who had given him a ride, while holding a knife to his throat.
In any event irrespective of whether the anguished cry of the victim "that man in there is trying to rob me” was heard by the defendant and undenied by him, I still vote to affirm.

 Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6.