State v. Carter

Citations

• 15 Wash. 121
• 45 P. 745
• 1896 Wash. LEXIS 147

Syllabus

<p>HOMICIDE — INSTRUCTIONS — SELF-DEFENSE — APPARENT DANGER — DUTY OF ASSAULTED TO RETREAT — CREDIBILITY OF WITNESS.</p> <p>The fact that the court explains to the jury the nature and legal effect of defendant’s plea is not open to the objection that it is a judicial comment on the facts instead of the law.</p> <p>The fact that the court charges the jury in one place in its instructions that the defendant claims the homicide was in self-defense on the part of defendant, “to prevent death to himself or serious bodily injury,” is not prejudicial when other parts of the instructions make it clear that the defendant had the right to act upon apparent, as distinguished from actual, danger.</p> <p>Where the court in the course of a charge to the jury states plainly and emphatically that the defendant might invoke the law of self-defense to protect his life or person from great “bodily harm,” it is not prejudicial error to also charge that “there can be no successful setting up of self-defense by a defendant unless . . . to save his own life or his person from dreadful harm or severe calamity.”</p> <p>While an instruction, in a case of homicide, may be so inapt as to imply that it was the duty of defendant to have retreated when assaulted, unless it would have been more hazardous to have done so, it can not be held prejudicial when the jury are also charged “that a person being where he had a right to be and without fault is violently assaulted, may, without retreating, repel force by •force.”</p> <p>A charge to the jury that they are warranted in disregarding the testimony of any witness if they believe that he has wilfully testified falsely to any matter is not prejudicial, when the error of the court in not stating that the falsity should be in a material matter was not raised by the exception taken, nor the court’s attention called to the inadvertence at the time.</p>