Court Opinion

ID: 9642584
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 18:03:36.437018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:49.798006
License: Public Domain

OPINION ON PETITION TO REHEAR
Defendant complains that we failed to respond to issue number five in his brief, to-wit, that defendant should have been granted a mistrial following the testimony of Officer Helfrick.
We noted in the main opinion that defendant moved for a mistrial after Officer Helfrick said defendant and Stroupe had been picked up several times on drunk charges. The officer was responding to the District Attorney’s question: “Any particular reason that you stopped and talked to them?”
In response to defendant’s objection and motion for a mistrial, the trial judge instructed the jury not to consider the truth of the statement that defendant and Stroupe had been involved in drunk charges, but to consider it only for the explanation of why they were stopped.
The two actors in the murder of the victim, defendant and Stroupe, both depicted themselves as derelicts whose principal activity was the pursuit of any substance that would intoxicate them. In light of the evidence in the record of numerous occa-*620si.ons when both had been drunk which was not detailed in the opinion, the response of Officer Helfrick that they had been picked up several times on drunk charges was insignificant. The question should not have been asked, but we find beyond a reasonable doubt that the answer did not prejudice defendant. The insistence that this error was a ground justifying a mistrial has no merit.
Defendant questions our interpretation of the testimony of Doctors White and McGhee, re-arguing his insistence that no causal connection was established between the beating of the ninety-one year old victim and her death more than seventeen days after her battered body was found and removed to the hospital. We have re-read the testimony of the two doctors and are satisfied that we have correctly dealt with that issue in the main opinion.
At defendant’s insistence we have also reconsidered our finding that the trial judge’s error in refusing to allow defendant to use in cross examination certain portions of the hospital records was harmless. While errors in this category and the error of far lesser magnitude chronicled above are disturbing to this Court, particularly in a case where the death penalty results, we affirm our finding that those errors separately and collectively, were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
The petition to rehear is denied.
BROCK, C.J., COOPER, HARBISON and DROWOTA, JJ., concur.