People v. Fong Sing

In a characteristically able argument, the senior counsel for the defendant urges a rehearing of this cause. There is nothing we can add to what has been said in the former opinion filed herein, except to express hearty concurrence in the general animadversion of the learned lawyer upon the practice too often resorted to in criminal cases by public prosecutors of lugging into their cases in argument matters having vital bearing upon the case which have not been brought in by evidence and which are calculated to deprive an accused of that fair and impartial trial which is guaranteed to him by the constitution and the statute laws of the state. A public prosecutor should be equally as solicitous of the protection of the rights of a citizen or other person on trial for his life or his liberty as the judge who presides at the trial, and it is obviously an egregiously erroneous notion if that public officer conceives it to be his duty to convict every person against whom a crime has been charged, regardless of whether he is or is not guilty or of whether the proof he is able to produce against one so accused is or is not sufficient to justify his conviction. And it is equally a mistake…

The defendant and two other Chinese, Charlie Suey and Sam Mie, were jointly charged by information filed in the superior court of San Joaquin County with the crime of murder in the alleged willful, deliberate, and malicious killing of a fellow-countryman named Ching Sing. The defendant was given a separate trial and the jury convicted him of murder of the first degree, fixing his punishment, however, at imprisonment for life. He has brought the case to this court on appeals from the judgment and the order denying him a new trial. The homicide occurred in the city of Stockton, in the county above named, on the fifth day of March, 1917, between the hours of 1 and 2 o'clock P.M. There is no claim that the evidence is insufficient to support the verdict, but it is vigorously insisted that prejudicial error was committed by the trial court in certain of its rulings whereby certain evidence offered by the defendant was excluded from the record, that the district attorney and the attorney specially employed *Page 255 to assist in the prosecution of the accused were guilty of misconduct at the trial which so seriously prejudiced the rights of the defendant as to have prevented a fair and…