Court Opinion

ID: 9651392
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:18:27.245503+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:33.492559
License: Public Domain

POMEROY, Justice
(concurring).
The trial judge in this case apparently gave the charge on voluntary manslaughter suggested by Dean Laub in his Pennsylvania Trial Guide, § 618.5. This sort of cautionary charge in a case where there is in fact no evidence of the elements of voluntary manslaughter, (such, for example, as a case of felony murder) seems to me not only proper but desirable. See Commonwealth v. Matthews, 446 Pa. 65, 82, N.2, 285 A.2d 510, 518 N.2 (1971), (dissenting opinion of Pomeroy, J.). Where, however, there is evidence that a killing, although intentional, was committed without malice, as where the defendant is shown to have been acting under the influence of sudden passion which was caused by legally adequate provocation that placed him beyond the control of reason, a verdict of voluntary manslaughter would obviously have an evidentiary basis. In such a situation, I can see no justification for the trial court to give to the jury his opinion to the contrary. The fact that the weight of the evidence may indicate guilt of a greater offense is not sufficient, in my view, to justify the cautionary charge I approved *445in Matthews, supra, where evidence of the elements of voluntary manslaughter were entirely absent.
The sole question for me, therefore, in the case at bar, is whether there was or was not evidence that would tend to show that John McNeill was guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The record satisfies me that a, verdict of voluntary manslaughter would have been supportable on the evidence, even though the verdict of murder which the jury returned in the first degree may well have been the more proper one. Since that verdict may have been influenced by the court’s observation that “there is no evidence [of] any legally sufficient cause of provocation” to reduce the killing to voluntary manslaughter, I agree that a new trial must be awarded. Commonwealth v. Bailey, 450 Pa. 201, 204-06, 299 A.2d 298, 300-01 (1973).