People v. Honeycutt

Defendant was charged with the murder of Florence Honeycutt, his wife, and with two prior convictions of felony. He pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity and admitted the prior convictions. A jury found that he was guilty, made no recommendation as to penalty, and found that he was sane at the time the offense was committed. This is an automatic appeal from the judgment imposing the death penalty. (Pen. Code §1239, subd. (b).) Defendant contends, and his contention is correct, that the instructions as to what constitutes murder of the first (as opposed to murder of the second) degree were erroneous in two particulars: First, in that the jury were told that ‘1 certain kinds of murder [by enumerated means and on enumerated occasions] . . . carry with them conclusive evidence of premeditation . . .”; and, second, in that the jury were told that “A man . . . can premeditate, that is, think before doing the act, the moment he conceives the purpose. ...” The People .contend that, in the circumstances of this case, such errors could not have prejudiced defendant. For the reasons hereinafter stated we agree with this contention of the People and have concluded that the judgment must be affirmed.

The evidence is without substantial conflict except on the crucial question (as to the degree of the crime) of whether, as defendant repeatedly stated after the homicide, “he had made up his mind to kill her,” or whether, as he testified at the trial, he had never planned or premeditated the killing of his wife.

Defendant first met Florence, the deceased, in August, 1944, in San Francisco. They intermarried in San Francisco and lived together there. Florence’s mother and stepfather lived near Roscoe in the comity of Los Angeles. In August, 1945, her stepfather went to San Francisco and “brought her down from that city.” Florence then lived with her mother and stepfather and worked as a waitress in a cafe owned and operated by the stepfather. Approximately three weeks after Florence left San Francisco defendant came to Roscoe and visited Florence at the restaurant. In early September, 1945, defendant and Florence spent 11 days in Highland Park as guests of Mrs. Greenhaw, a friend of Florence. During this time both defendant and Florence were under the influence of intoxicating liquor ‘ ‘ [m] ost of the time. ’ ’ When they left the home of Mrs. Greenhaw defendant and Florence moved to a rented room. They lived there one week. The landlord then requested them to move because of their excessive drinking.

Late in September defendant again went to the stepfather’s restaurant to see Florence. He was under the influence of intoxicating liquor and “hung around” for more than an hour although Florence’s stepfather requested him to leave. The stepfather called the police. Defendant was arrested, charged with drunkenness, pleaded guilty, and spent about three days in jail.

Defendant next saw Florence on November 12, 1945. On that day he started drinking at 9:30 a.m. He went to her family’s residence shortly before 6 p.m., knocked at the door, and Florence’s mother told him that Florence was not there. However, Florence came out of the house onto the back porch, and she and defendant talked “in a low, normal tone of voice” for a few minutes. She gave defendant six or seven dollars and defendant left. As soon as defendant went away Florence’s stepfather barricaded the front door by wedging a chair under the door knob. Defendant went to a bar, drank “10 or 15 beers,” purchased a bottle of muscatel wine and drank most of it. Shortly after 7 p.m. defendant returned to the home. He knocked at the back door; the stepfather refused to admit him. He went to the kitchen window; the stepfather told him to “get away from here.” Defendant replied, “I am coming in. ... You big fat-bellied son of a bitch, if you don’t come outside ... I am coming in. . . . I will kill you.” Defendant went to the front porch, onto which a living room window opened. He threw a gallon jar which contained ferns through the window. Florence’s stepfather armed himself with a 3-ineh square “meat tenderizer” and stationed himself inside this window. The jar hit him in the stomach. Defendant knocked glass remnants from the sash of the shattered window with a flower pot and came through the window. Florence’s stepfather struck defendant with the “meat tenderizer” and it became tangled in the curtain. Defendant tore down the window shade. He kicked the stepfather (who was 62 years of age and crippled) in the stomach, knocking him to the floor. The stepfather fell against Florence’s mother, knocking her to the floor. The stepfather “grabbed him [defendant] by one foot, and he kept kicking me in the stomach with the other one. ... I couldn’t hold him any longer, because he kept kicking me, and knocked the wind out of me.” Defendant went through the living room

■ The police arrived at the residence at about 7:25 p.m. As they approached the house they saw, through the glass of the door, defendant rising from the place where, they later determined, Florence’s body lay. As they opened the door defendant was walking into the kitchen, carrying the meat grinder. He started to wash it at the sink and they arrested him. The butcher knife, bent and bloody, was partly concealed under a pile of clothing which lay on the floor near the body. The neck and other pieces of a broken bottle which bore the label, “Muscatel,” were on the floor. (There is a conflict in the evidence as to whether this bottle had been carried into the

Both on the night of November 12 and on November 13 defendant voluntarily stated to police officers that the killing was premeditated and expressed the hope that he would receive the death penalty. He said that he repeatedly attacked deceased in the various manners above stated because “she was still breathing and moaning . . . she still seemed to be alive.

. . . She wouldn’t die.” After his arrest he asked “ten or twelve times on the way to the Station—if we were sure that she was dead. . . . And when we assured him that she was dead, he said, ‘Well, I did a good job, didn’t I?’ ” When he arrived at the police station defendant, without being requested to do so, said he would like to make a statement. He further said that “he would like to have the representatives of the Press there to get his story. ’ ’ He had previously twice described the killing in detail but had refused to state any reason for his actions. That, he had several times said, was “a secret that I will take to my grave.” However, at the station he not only again described the killing in detail but also, in a statement which was reduced to writing, thereafter read by the defendant and signed by him, he said, that “one of the reasons he had done so and had premeditated doing so for quite a long time past, was the fact that his wife had been intimate with . . . her step-father. ’ ’ In the signed statement it further appears that defendant was asked, “Did this killing tonight result in any way from . . . [the step-father’s] causing your arrest for drunkenness?” and answered, “It was the arrest and by him being intimate with her. It was both. I even told him that the next time I was arrested I would be arrested for a good charge. I kept my word. Too bad I didn’t kill him too. . . . Last week I thought it over but tonight it came to the climax.” Such statement also shows the following questions and answers: “Q. You had planned to kill your wife before you got drunk? A. Definitely. Q. When did you start drinking today? A. This morning at 9:30. Q. You had planned to kill before you started drinking this morning? A. Yes, absolutely, when I was sober. Q. Is there anything more that you want to add to this statement ? A. I don’t know. I don’t see anything that would help me, because I’m going. I know that. Q. Mr. Honeycutt, this statement has been made freely and voluntarily without any promise of reward or

Defendant in his testimony did not deny the substance of the above recited matters, but testified that he did not recall his reason for returning to the home of Florence’s family on the evening of November 12, that he did not recall speaking with Florence’s stepfather through the kitchen window, that he remembered breaking the front window with the jar and flower pot and starting to go through the window and “it felt to me that I was hit on the head with something, and the next thing I remember is that I saw my wife laying there, and she had been cut. ’ ’ He said, in response to specific questions, that he did not remember striking Florence of “doing anything to her.” Upon having his attention called to the statement which he had signed, in which he related in detail his hitting her with the sausage grinder, with his fists, stamping her with his feet “in the ribs, in the face, and in the stomach,” and being asked if he remembered “making that statement to the officers at that time, ’ ’ he gave the following explanation: “I remember very well making a statement to that effect, but the reason I made that is for the simple reason I saw the meat grinder and the butcher knife and so forth, and evidently any person that would look at it could tell how the body had been mistreated by seeing those weapons laying there,, that it had been mistreated by a knife and a sausage grinder.” He also explained that he had come to the conclusion that he had jumped on the body because “my feet were sore and then I had blood on my shoes, and lower portions of my trouser legs.” As to his statement to the police that the killing was “planned and premeditated, move by move,” he explained that he said that because “after realizing what I had done, I wanted to die. . . . As far as planning it, I never had. ” He testified, on cross-examination, that he had never accused Florence’s stepfather of being intimate with her and that he (the defendant) had not felt any ill will toward him on any account.

The jury were instructed in the language of the Penal Code (§§ 187-189) that:

“Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, with malice aforethought.

“Such malice may be express or implied. It is express when

there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow-creature. It is implied, when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

“All murder which is perpetrated by means of poison, or lying in wait, torture, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing, or which is committed in the perpetration or attempt to perpetrate arson, rape, robbery, burglary, or mayhem, is murder of the first degree; and all other kinds of murder are of the second degree.”

Defendant complains of two instructions given in connection with an explanation of these statutory definitions. The first is the illogical and disapproved former stock instruction that “certain kinds of murder . . . carry with them conclusive evidence of premeditation. . . . Where the killing is done in the perpetration, or attempt to perpetrate, some one of the felonies enumerated in the statute [Pen. Code, § 189], here the occasion is made conclusive evidence of premeditation. . . .” As pointed out in People v. Valentine (1946), 28 Cal.2d 121 , 134-137 [ 169 P.2d 1 ], and in People v. Bernard (1946), 28 Cal.2d 207 , 211 [ 169 P.2d 636 ] (where the instruction is quoted at length), “the fact that a killing is committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, one of the five felonies enumerated in section 189 of the Penal Code is not conclusive, or necessarily any, evidence that such killing was deliberate and premeditated. Even where the killing [murder] in perpetration or attempted perpetration of. one of the named felonies is unintended and accidental, nevertheless, as held in People v. Lindley (1945), 26 Cal.2d 780 , 791, [ 161 P.2d 227 ], ‘the offender “is guilty of murder of the first degree by the force of the statute. Killings [murders] by the means . . . under discussion are murders of the first degree because of the substantive statutory definition of the crime. Attempts to explain the statute to the jury in terms of nonexistent ‘conclusive presumptions’ tend more to confuse than to enlighten a jury unfamiliar with the inaccurate practice of stating rules of substantive law in terms of rules of evidence. ’ ’ Defendant, however, does not point out, and there does not appear to us, any respect in which the giving of the erroneous instruction was prejudicial in this case.

Defendant further complains of the giving of the repeatedly criticized stock instruction that ‘ ‘ There need be . . .

In this case other, correct instructions, conflicting with

It is true that “In a case where there is a conflict in the instructions and the court erred in the giving of one or

Defendant urges that ‘1 The very manner and means by which the homicide was committed in themselves negative the elements of ‘premeditation and deliberation’ as they have been defined in their applicability to first degree murder. These factors together with the defendant’s intoxication establish the homicide as one of murder of the second degree,” and that this court should exercise its power to reduce the degree of the crime. We agree with the People that the series of violent, criminal acts of defendant, once he had actually started to make his kill, does not establish that, despite the evidence to the contrary, the determination that he would kill could not have been deliberate and premeditated. The jury impliedly found that such acts indicated, rather, a continuity and singleness of purpose. And the question as to the effect of defendant’s intoxication, if any, was for the jury and they, adequately instructed on the subject, impliedly found against defendant’s contention. It may be noted, in this connection, that the evidence is ample to support a finding that, in the hour before the killing, the defendant deliberately resorted to the use of intoxicants with the object of dulling any compunctions he thought might otherwise hamper him in carrying out the plan he had formed.

Defendant does not contend, and it does not appear, that there was prejudicial error in the trial of the issue of his legal sanity.

For the reasons above stated the judgment is affirmed.

Gibson, C. J., Shenk, J., Carter, J., Traynor, J., and Spence, J., concurred. Edmonds, J., concurred in the judgment.