People v. Woon Tuck Wo

Citations

• 120 Cal. 294
• 52 P. 833
• 1898 Cal. LEXIS 755

Syllabus

<p>Criminal Law—Homicide—Trial—Remarks of Judge—Province of Jury. Remarks made by the judge upon the trial of a defendant accused of murder, concerning certain reporter’s notes offered in evidence, about which there was a dispute between the attorneys, to the ¡effect that the jury as sensible men would understand possible differences in the translation of Chinese into English, and that the jury would pass upon the facts and the whole of the testimony, and that it was for them to say what its value was, and what it pointed to, and what had been proved by it, do not constitute misconduct, or afford any ground for reversal of the judgment of conviction.</p> <p>Id.—Evidence—Misleading Experiments.—W here several witnesses for the prosecution had testified that they saw the defendant shoot the deceased with a pistol, at the door of a house in a certain street about midnight of a certain day, and that they recognized him at and immediately after the time when the shot was fired, and the testimony was conflicting as to the condition oí the light at that time, and. it appeared there could be no substantial reproduction of the same conditions under which the witnesses testified that they recognized the defendant, evidence of experiments made three months afterward by a witness to show that he was unable to recognize any person, at the place where the homicide was alleged to have been committed, where the witnesses for the prosecution had stood at the time of the homicide, would have a tendency to confuse and mislead, rather than enlighten the jury, and was properly excluded.</p> <p>Id.—Evidence of Experiments—Discretion.—Evidence of experiments is admissible, in proper cases, when they are shown to have been made under essentially the same conditions as those which existed in the-case on trial; .otherwise such evidence is not admissible for the reason that its tendency is to mislead and confuse the jury; but it is not proper to say that such evidence is not admissible on any