Commonwealth v. Ronello

Citations

• 242 Pa. 381
• 89 A. 553
• 1913 Pa. LEXIS 890

Syllabus

<p>Criminal law — Indictments—Evidence—Variance—Name of defendant.</p> <p>1. Where an indictment charged the defendant with the killing of Guiseppe Visalli and from the evidence it appeared that the name of the deceased was Joe Wilson, there is a variance between the allegata and probata where there is nothing to show that Guiseppe Visalli and Joe Wilson were one and the same person, and a conviction in such case will be reversed.</p> <p>Criminal procedure — Trials—Circumstantial evidence — Identification — Inadequate charge to jury — Misleading statements in charge — Province of court and jury.</p> <p>2. At the trial of one accused of murder, a trial judge who states to the jury as a fact something which is misleading and not authorized by the evidence commits reversible error.</p> <p>3. In a murder trial resulting in a verdict of guilty of murder of the first degree, the evidence to connect the accused with the homicide was entirely circumstantial and consisted of the testimony of a young woman, who said that she had seen a man by the light of a passing engine about eleven o’clock on the night when the killing was supposed to have occurred, on a road in the neighborhood where the body was found, and that afterwards she went to the jail and saw the prisoner, and believed he was the man whom she had seen on the road, and the testimony of two persons who said that a knife which was found two months later in the river at a point some twenty-five feet from the place where the body lay, and \\vhich was produced in court, looked like the knife which they had seen in possession of' the prisoner on the day of the crime. The court instructed the jury that the young woman had identified the prisoner as the man whom she had seen but did not instruct the jury as to how the evidence was to be considered and the degree of certainty which it must reach to warrant the conclusion of the identity of the prisoner with the man whom the witness had seen, and misrcicited the testimony a