Commonwealth v. Vardelle

Citations

• 70 Pa. Super. 241
• 1918 Pa. Super. LEXIS 221

Syllabus

<p>Criminal laio —Assault and battery — Evidence as to another crime.</p> <p>(Do make one criminal act evidence of another, some connection must exist between them; that connection must be traced in the general design, purpose or plan of the defendant, or it may be shown by such circumstances of identification as necessarily tends to establish that the person who committed one must have been guilty of the other. The collateral or extraneous offense must form a link in the chain of circumstances or proofs relied upon for conviction; an isolated or disconnected fact it is of no consequence. A defendant cannot be convicted of the offense charged simply because he is guilty of another offense.</p> <p>On the trial of an indictment against a woman for an aggravated assault and battery in shooting a man, it is reversible error to permit the man who was shot to testify that during a period of time which had ceased some weeks, or months before the shooting, he had lived on terms of criminal intimacy with the defendant, where there is no other evidence in the case that proof of the alleged earlier offense was of any aid in determining the guilt or innocence of the defendant of the offense charged in the indictment.</p> <p>Criminal law — Cross-examination of defendant — Act of March 15,1911, P. L. 20.</p> <p>On the trial of an indictment of. a woman for aggravated assault and battery in shooting a man, the defendant cannot under the Act of March IS, 1911, P. L. 20, be asked on cross-examination whether she had had criminal relations with the man whom she shot, if there is nothing in her testimony-in-ehief that brought her within either of the classes of those who are denied the protection of that act.</p>