Court Opinion

ID: 9567178
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:50:10.826552+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:00:22.016585
License: Public Domain

Justice Higgins
dissenting.
In my opinion, prejudicial error is not disclosed by the record in this case. The court now overrules former decisions that the court must charge the jury as to “the legal principles applicable in their consideration of alibi evidence, whether requested or not.”
According to sound principles of criminal practice, upon arraignment a defendant may plead “Not Guilty,” “Guilty,” or “Nolo Contendere” or he may “Stand mute.” In the latter event the trial judge must enter a plea of “Not Guilty.” There is no such plea as “Alibi.”
Following a plea of Not Guilty, a defendant is entitled to challenge the sufficiency of the State’s evidence. He may introduce evidence of his innocence, and as part of that evidence he may offer evidence that he not only did not commit the offense charged, but that he could not have committed it because at the time of its commission he was elsewhere.
In reviewing the defendant’s evidence, the court must charge the jury to take into account all the defendant’s evidence including the evidence that he was not at the scene of the crime, but was elsewhere at the time of its commission. Mention of the word “Alibi” is not required. The word means elsewhere. It has no “sacramental” meaning. When the court correctly charges the jury with respect to a defendant’s evidence that he was elsewhere at the time the offense was *627committed, as Judge Exum did in this case, the court gives the defendant full benefit of the evidence that he was elsewhere.
The view now expressed by the court conforms to the view held by Justice Rodman and myself when we dissented in State v. Spencer, 256 N.C. 487. The decision in that case and in other cases like it, were in my opinion, erroneous as the court now holds. The present defendant obtained no vested rights in this erroneous decision. I vote no error in this case.