Stamp

These are appeals by Jonathan Earl Stamp, Michael John Koory and Billy Dean Lehman, following jury verdicts of guilty of robbery and murder, both in the first degree. Each man was given a life sentence on the murder charge together with the time prescribed by law on the robbery count.

Defendants appeal their conviction of the murder of Carl Honeyman who, suffering from a heart disease, died between 15 and 20 minutes after Koory and Stamp held up his business, the General Amusement Company, on October 26, 1965, at 10:45 a.m. Lehman, the driver of the getaway car, was apprehended a few minutes after the robbery; several weeks later Stamp was arrested in Ohio and Koory in Nebraska.

Broadly stated, the grounds of this appeal are: (1) insufficiency of the evidence on the causation of Honeyman’s death; (2) inapplicability of the felony-murder rule to this case; (3) errors in the choice of instructions given and refused; and (4) erroneous admission in evidence of the extrajudicial confessions of Stamp and Koory and the incriminating statement of Lehman.

On this appeal appellants primarily rely upon their position that the felony-murder doctrine should not have been applied in…