Pharr v. State

Citations

• 10 Tex. Ct. App. 485

Syllabus

<p>1. Evidence—Declarations of an Accused.— Declarations made by a party accused of crime are not admissible as evidence in bis behalf, unless they form a part of the res gestee, or are a part of a confession offered by the prosecution, or come within the rule that when a part of an act or declaration has been given in evidence the whole may be required. ,</p> <p>3. Evidence—Res Gestae.— Declarations of a party charged with murder, which were made the day after the killing, and many miles from the scene, form no part of the res gestee.</p> <p>3. Charge of the Court—Practice.—Article 783 of the Code of Criminal Procedure inhibits, iu an argument upon a second trial, any allusion to a former conviction, but does not prohibit a reference iu the charge of the court to a former acquittal of higher grades of the offense charged iu the indictment. It was not error, therefore, for the District Judge, in his charge to the jury on the second trial of a defendant charged with murder, to state that the defendant had been acquitted of murder in the first degree, and that, therefore, there was no occasion for him to explain to the jury the difference between the two degrees of malice. In such cases it is proper for the judge to instruct the jury, in appropriate language, that they should not consider the subject of murder in the first degree.</p> <p>4. Same—Certainty.— Moral certainty is that degree of certainty which is supported by a reasonable probability, founded on the experience of the ordinary course of things, and consequently must be reasonable in itself. It was, therefore, not error in a charge on circumstantial evidence to instruct the jury that all the circumstances, when taken together, must lead to a satisfactory conclusion and produce in effect a reasonable and moral certainty that the defendant and no other person committed the offense charged.</p> <p>5. Same.—The italicising or underscoring of the word “ unlawfully ” in a charge of the court on a case of murder a