Court Opinion

ID: 9772250
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:11:51.900334+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:42.908437
License: Public Domain

GALBREATH, Judge
(dissenting).
In this appeal from a first degree murder conviction in the Madison County Criminal Court it is conceded that the motive for the brutal shotgun slaying of the victim was jealousy engendered by a belief on the part of the defendant that the victim had been having an affair with his estranged wife. There is no other explanation offered by either side for the homicide except that the defendant, rightly or *231wrongly, had become convinced that his wife had become overly friendly with the deceased, Norris Attaway, who would on occasion take her home from a beer tavern where she worked for the owner. The wife, as a witness for the State, maintained that the relationship was innocent and that the reason for her having to accept rides home from the victim was because the defendant would not take her himself or provide means for her to transport herself. Be that as it may, the defendant accused his wife on several occasions of having the affair; and a few days before the fatal shooting on Saturday, the 11th day of September, 1971, he asked he her to quit going with Attaway and to stop working in the tavern. She refused to stop working and told the defendant that she had to provide for herself and the baby born after he had left her the past June.
There is some dispute as to whether the last confrontation between the defendant and Mrs. Baxter was on Wednesday or Friday before the killing, but in any event the defendant armed himself with a shotgun and a pistol and on Saturday sought out the deceased at his place of work. In spite of pleas from his helpless victim and a co-worker to not shoot him, he did so three times, each time methodically reaching into a pocket for a shell with which to reload the single barrel shotgun. He then threatened to return and shoot Attaway again if he ever heard of him speaking to his wife again. He also threatened the witness with like consequences if he said anything about what had happened. He then went to the tavern where his wife was and told her what he had done. He forced her at the point of the shotgun, after shooting a hole in the wall, to accompany him in his car telling her he was going to take her out in the woods and kill her. In a remarkable deference to law and order he stopped the car in obedience to a stop sign and Mrs. Baxter jumped out and escaped as he drove away. He later voluntarily surrendered to the Jackson Police Department.
It is primarily contended on behalf of the plaintiff that the facts discussed above do not support a finding of a willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated murder as defined by law so as to support the verdict and sentence of ninety-nine years in the penitentiary.
The elements of murder and manslaughter have repeatedly been discussed by our Supreme Court. One of the best treatises on the subject may be found in Rader v. State, 73 Tenn. 610:
“When the murder is not committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any of the felonies named then, in order to constitute murder in the first degree, it must be perpetrated by poison or lying in wait, or some other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious and premeditated killing; that is to say, the deliberation and premeditation must be akin to the deliberation and premeditation manifested where the murder is by poison or lying in wait — the cool purpose must be formed and the deliberate intention conceived in the mind, in the absence of passion, to take the life of the person slain. Murder by poison and lying in wait, are given as instances of this sort of deliberate and premeditated killing, and in such cases no other evidence of the deliberation and premeditation is required; but where the murder is by other means, proof of deliberation and premeditation is required. It is true it has been held several times that the purpose need not be deliberated upon any particular length of time — it is enough if it precede the act; but in all such cases the purpose must be cooly formed, and not in passion, or, if formed in passion, it must be executed after the passion has had time to subside. As was clearly pointed out by the circuit judge, if there was provocation of a sufficient character, and the killing was under passion thus excited, it would be manslaughter. But it is not every provocation that will reduce the killing to manslaughter, not even blows under all circumstances, for *232the resentment must bear a reasonable proportion to the provocation. Nevertheless, although there be no sufficient provocation to reduce the killing to manslaughter, still there may be such provocation as to excite passion in fact, and if the purpose to kill is formed in passion thus excited, and executed without time for the passion to cool, it is not murder in the first degree, but murder in the second degree.”
The nature of the passion under provocation spoken of is described in another case.
“It is not necessary to reduce the killing to manslaughter that the passion should be so great as to render the defendant incapable of deliberation or premeditation. If the circumstances be such as are calculated to produce such excitement and passion as would obscure the reason of an ordinary man and induce him, under such excitement and passion, to strike the blow that causes the death of the deceased, this will reduce the killing to manslaughter.” Toler v. State, 152 Tenn. 1, 260 S.W. 134.
An adequate provocation is said to be:
“a provocation of such a character as would, in the mind of an average reasonable man, stir resentment likely to cause violence, obscuring the reason, and leading to action from passion rather than judgment.” Freddo v. State, 127 Tenn. 376, 155 S.W. 170.
The illicit relationship of a spouse and another is adequate provocation to reduce the homicide to voluntary manslaughter.
“We are of the opinion that if, as a matter of fact, the deceased had debauched the wife of plaintiff in error, and the plaintiff in error had been apprised of that fact and had become convinced of its truth on the day of the wedding or thereafter, and, with reasonable expedition, while under the influence of passion and agitation produced by such information, had killed Noe, he would only have been guilty of voluntary manslaughter.” Davis v. State, 161 Tenn. 23, 28 S.W.2d 993.
A rather diligent search of the compiled decisions of our Supreme Court has failed to uncover a single opinion in which a slaying prompted by the jealous passion aroused by a firm conviction on the part of a husband that another man has debauched his wife has been held to be murder in the first degree. The suppressed frustration and resentment that naturally arises in the mind of a husband whose wife has been sexually active with another man is too well known to warrant elaborate discourse. That this powerful emotion may not subside even after days of worry and mental turmoil is also recognized. Thus it sometimes occurs that after days and nights of brooding, reflection and unsuccessful efforts to overcome the violence that is locked up inside, the reason is overcome and tragedy results.
The fact that the defendant appeared calm to witnesses who saw him before the shooting does not dispel the fact that in all likelihood he was, and had been for days, working himself up to the ultimate frenzy of jealously that motivated his final outburst. This very appearance of calm and the effort to hide the real emotion has long been recognized as much worse than would be outbursts of vocal rage accompanied by crying and threats against the object of passion, others or himself. Shakespeare was right, as students of the emotion know, when he advised, “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er burdened heart and bids it break.” Our Supreme Court recognized this in a case in which it reduced to voluntary manslaughter the slaying of a suspected paramour months after the husband learned of the supposed illicit relationship between his wife and his victim:
“Nor is this conclusion rebutted by the fact that defendant engaged in casual and calm conversation with Mrs. Porter on his way to Fayetteville after being *233given this additional information by-Mills. In a case somewhat like this one this Court took notice of the fact that ‘suppressed anger is a common accompaniment of passion, the deepest and most powerful emotion * * Drye v. State, 181 Tenn. 637, 646, 184 S.W.2d 10, 13. Add to that the fact that unexpectedly he met the debaucher of his wife and the destroyer of his home within an hour after he had received information correctly convincing him of that fact.” Whitsett v. State, 201 Tenn. 317, 299 S.W.2d 2.
Error is assigned to the refusal of the trial judge to grant a continuance in order that the defense could produce two witnesses who, it claims, would have testified that they told the defendant of improper relations between Mrs. Baxter and the deceased. This information may well have been the deciding factor that tipped the already unbalanced scales of reasoning in the defendant’s mind. However, the trial judge remarked that there was enough proof already in the record to substantiate the belief of the defendant that his wife was having an affair with Attaway, and he declined to grant the continuance for the purpose of such cumulative testimony. In this exercise of his sound discretion he was not in error, but his very acknowledgement that the defendant was possessed of such provocative information, whether true or false, demonstrates that the defendant at the time of the killing was acting in the hot blood of passion.
The time may soon come when all persons convicted of first degree murder will indiscriminately be put to death as the only permissible punishment if the death penalty is to conform to constitutional standards discussed in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346. If this ever happens, it is my firm conviction that no jury would ever decree death as the deserved punishment of a man who, convinced of his wife’s infidelity with another man, in a torment of passion kills either the object of his love or the person he is convinced has defiled her body. As aforesaid, not one decision of our Supreme Court has been found after diligent research which affirms a first degree murder conviction where the slaying was motivated by jealousy of a husband over his wife’s suspected infidelity, although there is ample precedent for my isolated position here that such crimes are not first degree murder. See Davis v. State, supra.
It is conceded in defendant’s brief that he is guilty of second degree murder or manslaughter. All murders are presumed in law to be in the second degree, particularly those in which a deadly weapon is employed. See Witt v. State, 46 Tenn. 5. The burden, once the fact of killing has been proved, is on the State to raise the degree and on the defendant to prove facts in mitigation so as to reduce it to manslaughter. See Nance v. State, 210 Tenn. 328, 358 S.W.2d 327. While the facts proved in this case in my opinion would not support first degree murder, I cannot say that the jury would not have been justified in finding the defendant guilty of murder in the second degree, and I would reduce the degree of the offense and the punishment accordingly under such authorities as Forsha v. State, 183 Tenn. 604, 194 S.W.2d 463.