BASS v. STATE

Citation Codes

Equivalent Citations

citation codes

Docket Number

No. 31962.

Attorney(S)

T.B. Davis, of Columbia, for appellant. The court below committed reversible error in instructing the jury to return a verdict of guilty if they believed from the evidence that the defendant committed the acts charged in the indictment, etc., without submitting to the jury the question of his age. In other words, the instruction should have advised the jury that before they could return a verdict of guilty that they must believe from the evidence that at the time of the alleged commission of the crime he was above the age of fourteen years. Dickey v. State, 86 Miss. 525, 38 So. 776; Beason v. State, 96 Miss. 105, 50 So. 488; Patterson v. State, 115 So. 777, 149 Miss. 678. W.D. Conn, Jr., Assistant Attorney-General, for the state. From the decisions of this court, namely: Williams v. State, 160 Miss. 485, 135 So. 210; Holmes v. State, 133 Miss. 610, 98 So. 104; Miles v. State, 99 Miss. 165, 54 So. 946, and Beason v. State, 96 Miss. 105, 50 So. 488, it seems that in addition to the requirement that the jury believe that a burglary, in fact, was committed and that the defendant was the burglar, the jury would have to go further and find that the defendant was mentally capable of committing the crime of burglary. Only one instruction was given in the case and that one was requested by the state, and although there was a conflict of evidence as to the age of this defendant, the jury was not presented with this issue in the instruction, but assumed that he was guilty, regardless of his age or mental development. In the Williams case, supra, the state's instructions did not present this issue to the jury, although there was a conflict in the testimony as to the age of the defendant. The defendant procured an instruction which correctly presented the law on the subject and the court held that all instructions were construed together and that the part omitted in the said instruction was supplied by the instruction given at the request of the defendant.

Judges

Smith, C.J., delivered the opinion of the court.

See more information ...

Smart Summary

Please sign up to generate summary.

BASS v. STATE.

INFANTS.

In prosecution for burglary in which evidence was conflicting whether defendant had passed his fourteenth year when offense was committed, omission of instruction requiring jury to find that defendant was then over fourteen or was of required capacity held fatal error.

Smith, C.J., delivered the opinion of the court.

This is an appeal from a conviction for burglary. The appellant was not represented by counsel in the court below.

According to a portion of the evidence, if true, the appellant was only thirteen years old when the alleged crime was committed. There was also some evidence tending to show that he had passed his fourteenth year when the alleged crime was committed. The only evidence as to the appellant's capacity for the commission of a crime was that one of the witnesses said he had never heard anything wrong against the appellant, and that he was able to distinguish between moral right and wrong.

No instructions were requested by the appellant, and the only instruction for the state wholly omitted any reference to the necessity of the jury's believing that the appellant was either over the age of fourteen when the alleged crime was committed, or that, if not, he was of the required capacity for the commission of crime. This omission was fatal error under several prior decisions of this court.

Reversed and remanded.

BASS v. STATE.

Comments