Smith v. State

140 S.W.2d 452, 139 Tex. Crim. 355, 1940 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 367
Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas·Decided May 22, 1940·No. No. 21031·Published·Cited by 4 cases

Opinion

GRAVES, Judge.

Appellant was convicted in the county court of an aggravated assault upon Quanah Parker Allen, and fined the sum of $150.00, and from a judgment thereon this appeal is predicated.

The facts are voluminous and show that at a spinach festival and rodeo at Crystal City, with a large crowd present, the complaining witness was present and seemed to be under the in[357]*357fluence of intoxicating liquor. He was doubtless creating some kind of disturbance, and at the request of the person in charge of the rodeo there was an attempt made to quiet or remove Mr. Allen from the rodeo grounds. This attempt finally resulted in an encounter between Allen and one Arch Miller, a special ranger, in which it was claimed that Miller struck Allen over the head with a pistol. At about that time in this first difficulty three State patrolmen appeared upon the scene and took Allen in charge, and attempted to remove him from the rodeo grounds. They seemed to experience some difficulty in getting Allen away from the crowd gathered around the scene of the trouble, and one of the patrolmen asked the appellant to assist them. Appellant was the sheriff of Frio County, a neighboring county, and he walked along behind the patrolmen through the crowd. Upon arriving at the patrol car, one patrolman got in front with Mr. Smith, and one patrolman got in the rear seat with Allen. Allen was using vile and obscene language, and, according to the witnesses, was cursing Smith, as well as others. Allen began fighting and striking Smith as well as interfering with the driver of the car, when they told him they were taking him to jail. The driver of the car claims that the conduct of Allen nearly caused the driver to lose control of the patrol car in the heavy traffic, and he turned off the heavily traveled road, endeavoring to find another road to the jail; that he took the wrong road and stopped to turn back, at which point Allen and Smith got out of the car and started fighting. These officers say Smith was fighting with his fists only. Allen says he was getting the best of the fight and Smith began striking him (Allen) with a blackjack and must have struck him forty or fifty times. Eventually they got Allen back in the car, and got him to the jail and into an office. They could not find the key to the jail, and one of the patrolmen went back to the rodeo grounds and got the key to the jail and returned, and they locked Allen up for the night. While waiting for the key to the jail, Allen continued his cursing of Smith, so the witnesses say, and finally he and Smith had another fight, Allen saying that Smith again hit him over the head with a blackjack. In the meantime Allen’s wife and some friends had come to the jail to look after Allen, and the officers refused to let the ladies in, they say, on account of the foul language he was using in his drunken condition. Allen’s wife, however, says that she saw Smith strike Allen with a blackjack while they were in this office.

There were three counts in the indictment in this case; only [358]*358one, however, was presented to the jury, and being the count on which a conviction herein was had. This count reads as follows: “And the Grand Jurors aforesaid, upon their oaths aforesaid, do further present, that heretofore, to-wit, on or about the 24th day of March, 1939, and anterior to the presentment of this indictment, in said county and State, Warren Smith, did then and there unlawfully, with a slung shot, the same being then and there a deadly weapon, commit an aggravated assault and battery in and upon Quanah P. Allen, in this, that the said Warren Smith did then and there, with said slung shot, whip, strike, and bruise the said Quanah P. Allen, by hitting him with said slung shot, on his body and head, in a manner that constituted said slung shot a deadly weapon, against the peace and dignity of the State.”

It will be noted therefrom that appellant was charged with striking Allen with a slung shot. The carrying on one’s person of a slung shot is denounced by law under Art. 483, P. C., and a slung shot is defined by Webster as “a metal ball of small size with string attached, used by ruffians for striking.” We find, however, in the case of Vargas v. State, 79 S. W. (2d) 860, that this court held that a piece of metal inclosed in strips of horsehide or leather, with one end tapering, enabling such instrument to be strapped to the wrist, sustained a conviction for carrying a “slung shot.”

Mrs. Q. P. Allen described the instrument which she called a “blackjack” as “some kind of a heavy leather handle with an end to it, about that long and it is very hard, filled with some hard substance, about ten or twelve inches long.”

Mr. Allen described a blackjack as “In my opinion, a blackjack is a leather sack with the end of it filled with lead, flexible.”

In 8 Corpus Juris, p. 1113, we find a blackjack defined as “A small leather-covered club or billy weighted at the head and having an elastic shaft,” this being a quotation from Webster’s International Dictionary.

A slung shot is defined in 58 Corpus Juris, p. 773, as “A ball of shot or metal covered with leather, and a band of elastic or leather attached to such ball, and made so that the same can be attached to the wrist or arm of a person; a metal ball of small size with a string attached used for striking; a small mass of metal or stone fixed on a flexible handle, strap or the like, used for a weapon.”

[359]*359It will be observed that with the record in the condition that the witnesses both say, that the appellant struck Allen with a blackjack, and the indictment alleging that Allen was struck with a slung shot, the court charged the jury relative to the use of a slung shot only by appellant upon Allen. After the main charge had been prepared the trial court presented an additional charge to the jury in the following language: “A slung shot is a weapon of offense or defense and becomes a deadly weapon when in the manner of its use it is calculated to produce death or serious bodily injury.”

Appellant objected to such charge and presented to the court special charges Nos. 4, 5 and 6, covering a definition of a billy as described in 8 Corpus Juris, p. 1109, and a slung shot as set forth in Geary v. State, 108 S. W. 379.

The court’s definition of a slung shot is rather broad, and would take in any weapon of any kind that could be used for either offense or defense, and we think he should have yielded to appellant’s requested charge and defined the same in some such language as used by Mr. Webster or the Geary case, supra.

The court throughout his charge refers to a slung shot while the State’s witnesses refer to a blackjack. This contradictory matter should be eliminated or harmonized in some way in the event of a new trial herein.

Again we note that although appellant was charged with making an assault upon Q. P. Allen with a deadly weapon, and although the court’s charge was objected to because nowhere did such charge define what in law constituted a deadly weapon, and appellant also offered the court a charge thereon, the court failed to thus charge the jury.

Again we find the court’s charge on self-defense was objected to as being too restrictive, and appellant submitted to the trial court a charge thereon that seems to us to have been called for by the facts in the case, especially in the portion thereof that dealt with apparent danger as viewed from appellant’s standpoint. It is noted that apparent danger was not touched upon by the court’s charge.

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Smith v. State, 140 S.W.2d 452, 139 Tex. Crim. 355, 1940 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 367 (Tex. 1940).

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