Gavin v. State

Citations

• 42 Fla. 553

Syllabus

<p>Criminal Law — Challenge of Juror Must Precede Verdict — Section 2831 Revised Statutes Construed — Reasonable Doubt as to Any Essential Fact Necessitates acquittal — Murder in Second Degree.</p> <p>1. Section 2831, Revised Statutes provides that “no member of a grand jury which finds a bill of indictment shall be put upon a jury for the trial of that indictment, if challenged for that cause by the defendant.” Tire inhibition here placed upon the serving of a grand juror as a member of the trial jury to try an indictment found by him as such grand juror is expressly made conditional upon a challenge being interposed by the defendant for that cause. The effect of the statute is not absolutely to disqualify a grand juror from service on a trial jury to try indictments found by such grand juror, but makes it only a ground of challenge for cause, which challenge the defendant may waive or not, as he sees proper. By accepting the juror, without exercising this right of challenge given him by the statute, the defendant waives such right, and it is too late after verdict to claim the benefit of it.</p> <p>2. When, to support a conviction of guilt, certain facts are essential, then a reasonable doubt as to either of these facts should produce the defendant’s acquittal.</p> <p>3. When the proofs show that a homicide was perpetrated by an act necessarily and essentially imminently dangerous to another, and where there is no cause for the act, no provocation, and no passion, and was not accidental, but reckless and wanton, and evincing a depraved mind, regardless of human life, though without any premeditated design to effect the death of any person, such a case falls within the definition of murder in the second degree.</p> <p>4. The majority of the court (Taylor, C. J., dissenting; find the evidence sufficient to sustain the conviction.</p>