Court Opinion

ID: 9625018
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:25:08.342908+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:59.493340
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice SHARP
dissenting.
I am in accord with the decision of the majority that the indictment in this case is sufficient to support the verdict of guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and the judgment based thereon. I dissent from the majority’s decision that defendant is entitled to a new trial because the court failed to submit the issue of simple assault as a possible verdict.
It is correctly stated in the majority opinion that “there is no evidentiary conflict regarding the nature of the weapon used [stick] nor in the manner of its use.” The stick, which accompanied the case on appeal to this Court as an exhibit, is described in the opinion and correctly denominated there as “a hard wooden club.” As defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) a club is “a heavy staff, esp. of wood usu. tapering . . . wielded with the hand as a striking weapon . . . .” The stick in this case fits this definition precisely.
In my view this stick, when used as a club by an able bodied man, is a deadly weapon per se, and all the evidence tends to *645show that defendant used it as such. See State v. Perry, 226 N.C. 530, 39 S.E. 2d 460 (1946). Defendant, according to his testimony, is 35 years old and employed by the State Highway Department. “The nature of his duties” are “the cutting of new highways, straightening up and different things.”
At the beginning of the fight, after defendant and Whitfield had engaged in fisticuffs, Whitfield went into the filling station. Defendant followed and, inside, he picked up the stick. Whitfield described subsequent events as follows:
“When I went out he started swinging at me and tried to hit me over the head with it. He tried to hit me on the head but I threw up my arms and blocked it off. I had big knots on my arms. He hit me on the arm with the stick. I hit him in an effort to stop him from hitting me with the stick. I caught hold of the stick, trying to keep him from hitting me on the head, but I could not get it away from him. After he saw that he could not do much to me with a stick, the defendant left in an automobile.”
A short time thereafter defendant returned to the filling station. This time Whitfield had the stick, and when defendant stuck his head in the service station door Whitfield hit him “in the side of the head with the stick.” As a result of the wound thus inflicted defendant said that “seven stitches were performed at the Person County Memorial Hospital the same afternoon and [he] was in a lot of pain from the cut.”
This stick, used offensively by either defendant or Whitfield was clearly a deadly weapon. That Whitfield was able to protect his head from the blows which defendant attempted to inflict upon him with the stick and that the blows upon his arms raised knots instead of breaking flesh and bones does not change the character of the weapon or the assault which defendant made upon him. Had defendant been attempting to shoot Whitfield with a gun and Whitfield had deflected the shot upward by grabbing his arm or the gun, defendant would have been nonetheless guilty of an assault with a deadly weapon. In State v. Hobbs, 216 N.C. 14, 3 S.E. 2d 431 (1939) this Court held that the trial court correctly charged the jury that “if the defendant intentionally threw a brick at the prosecuting witness and struck and broke the windshield of the • truck he was driving, although he may not have stricken the witness, the defendant was guilty of an assault with *646a deadly weapon. The Court further held that the trial judge’s failure to submit to the jury the charge of a simple assault was not error “for the reason that there is no evidence of simple assault.”
The serious injury which defendant inflicted upon Whitfield occurred, of course, when defendant stomped his face. The trial judge, however, being of the opinion that the indictment did not encompass that assault, instructed the jury to consider only the assault in which defendant used the stick.
I vote to affirm the judgment of the Superior Court.