Canady v. State

154 S.E. 332, 171 Ga. 11, 1930 Ga. LEXIS 272
CourtSupreme Court of Georgia
DecidedJuly 30, 1930
DocketNo. 7827
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 154 S.E. 332 (Canady v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Georgia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Canady v. State, 154 S.E. 332, 171 Ga. 11, 1930 Ga. LEXIS 272 (Ga. 1930).

Opinion

Hill, J.

The grand jury of Ware County indicted Emma Canady for the murder of John Canady, her husband, and alleged that she killed and murdered him “by shooting, stabbing, hitting and beating the said John Canady with a certain pistol, gun, rifle, and a piece of iron, and with an instrument to the grand jurors unknown, and in a manner and means unknown to the grand jury.” The trial jury returned a verdict of guilt]r, with a recommendation that the defendant be imprisoned in the penitentiary for life; and she was accordingly so sentenced by the court. She excepted to the overruling of her motion for a new trial.

The State relied for conviction upon a confession by the accused, with corroborating circumstances. The evidence tended to show that she operated a restaurant in connection with her home at Way-cross, Georgia, where she and her husband, John Canady, resided; that on the night of August 19, 1929, John Canady, Emma Canady, Eliza Hicks, and a child ate supper together in the restaurant at 8 o’clock p. m.; and that when John Canady had finished his supper he left, and was soon followed by his wife, who said to Eliza Hicks, “I am going down the street.” She came back to the house later and told Eliza that “John was gone to work, she didn’t say where or nothing. She says,. ‘Hurry and shut up.’” Eliza Hicks sat up a little while, and then went to bed. She testified: “Emma never did come back from down the street, and I didn’t see. her no more until about 12 o’clock. I didn’t have no time piece. When I seen her she was to my bed. I was asleep, and she was telling me to ‘wake up, I got a telegram from your husband on the other side [13]*13of Homerville. Yon must come at once/ that my child was bad off sick. Her suit-case was down on the floor, back, and she called up the táxi and said she was coming with me, and it wasn’t long before the taxi got there and carried us to Mitchell’s house, and she went in the house. Harris, driving the taxi, the one she phoned for, carried us to Mitchell’s. Mitchell is another taxi driver. Mitchell said something ailed his car, and she taken me to Maggie Canady’s. Mitchell didn’t come with us. When we got there Maggie’s sister, Marie White, opened the door; we went in, and she [Emma Canady] told Maggie she got a phone message from hex brother, and she was worried to death over the child, and she wanted me to stay there until she could go down, until she could get a taxi to go that night, and if she could not go that night she would go the next day, but for me to sure stay there until she come back and don’t go over to her house until the next day. She says, ‘Stay right here to Maggie’s.’ That was Monday night, the same night they say John Canady was killed.”

Richard Mitchell, a taxicab driver, testified that on the night of the alleged murder the accused came to his house and asked him to drive her to DuPont. She said her brother’s daughter was lying at the point of death', and she had just got the message and wanted to go. Mitchell told her he could not take her; the accused replied, "You are going to let me fall down; I just knowed you would have carried me since I am in this tight; I have just got to go.” Marie White testified that on the night of the alleged murder Emma Canady came to her house and told her she had a telegram from her brother that the baby was bad off sick. Her sister-in-law was with her. Gus Reddick testified: On the night of the alleged killing the accused came to his house late at night and woke him up, and "it seemed like she was in a great rush. She wanted to go to Blackshear. She said, ‘Make haste and hitch up and carry me to Blackshear.’ I taken my old mule and wagon and got on the road, and we gets a pretty good little piece out on the road - going to Blackshear. I asked her what she wanted to go to Blackshear for, and she says, ‘I want to be away just as much as two or three days, and I will come back to Waycross and get me $500.’ I carried her down to Blackshear, and we went down to a house, and out come a man, and I says, ‘A lady wants to stop over with you to-night.’ And he told her to come on in, and she went on in, and I walked [14]*14back and come on back to Waycross, and when I got back it seems to me like, as near as I could get after it, the sun was up an hour high in the morning. She says to me, her and her husband had taken a walk, shine walk, out down the Jacksonville road, and she said that she had killed him. When she came to my house she had a suit-case and the little dog, and she left the dog at my house and carried the suit-ease with her. She said when she got a way down the Jacksonville road that she taken a soda-water bottle and she popped him over the head, and she said that she more than done it, she said a little spot of blood flew side of her jaw; and I looks back after her sitting on the wagon side of me, and I said, 'If you did, these white folks will kill me;’ still not believing, gentlemen, that she would have done such a thing as that.” John Brown, testified for the State that on the night of the alleged homicide he was living in Blackshear, and on that night a man came to his door and told him a lady wanted to spend the night at his house. He permitted the woman, whom he identified as the accused, to spend the night there. She told him that she was worried. Anna Bell Brown, the wife of John Brown, also identified the accused as the woman who spent the night at'th'eir house.

James Edwards, an undertaker, testified: The body of a man who had been run over by a railroad-train was brought to his establishment. The accused came there the next day about 4 or 5 o’clock, and said she wanted to see the suit-case. Witness brought out the suit-case, and she said it was hers, and that she lent it to her husband to go oil to work. Witness opened the suit-case; the accused picked up a hat, threw it down, “went to hollering,” 'and-said that was her husband’s hat, that she bought it from a man named Morgan. Witness put the hat into the suit-case, closed it, and told the man who was with her to take her out, she was about to faint. These two left with the hat and the suit-case. Augustus Scarlett, an undertaker, testified: “We went out and .picked up a body off the Jacksonville railroad. It was, it looks like, about a mile below the section-house towards Jacksonville. The section-house may be a quarter of a mile below where Sweat Street crosses the Coast Line. I found part of the body. I didn’t find all of it. He was cut at what I consider the waist line, that was mangled from the waist up. I could not tell who .it was from the waist up. The part that was mangled, we found that between the tracks and [15]*15down side of it, and the part that was whole from his waist down we found lying in the ditch, kind of. We went up and picked it up. There was a suit-case when we got there, and it had nearly a quart of water in a bottle, and in that was two scraps of cloth about thejsize of your hand; and then we found a hat and then an old raincoat — a kind of a tan old raincoat, and a piece of iron about two feet long. That suit-case is very much like it. We brought the suit-case to the undertaker’s, and it stayed there, I guess, for a day or so. That is the bottle and stuff there; that is the rain-coat; that is the hat; that is the piece of iron. I guess the iron is’between 20 inches and two feet long and about three fourths of an inch square. It was lying beside the rain-coat; the rain-coat was lying on the ground and one end of it was lying on the rain-coat. The suit-case was closed when I saw it. When I found the piece of iron it was outside the suit-case. That [piece of iron] looks like a piece of .steel. It is not the kind of iron they usually use to reinforce concrete.

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Bluebook (online)
154 S.E. 332, 171 Ga. 11, 1930 Ga. LEXIS 272, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/canady-v-state-ga-1930.