Burns

The defendant, having been charged by information filed by the district attorney of Mendocino County with the crime of murder, was adjudged guilty by the jury of the crime of manslaughter, and he brings the cause to this court on an appeal from both the judgment and the order denying his application for a new trial.

The homicide occurred in a hop-field of a Mr. Hildreth in Mendocino County, on the night of the eighteenth of September, 1914.

The defendant, who is an Indian, with other Indians and a number of white persons, was, at the time of the homicide, engaged in picking hops. It appears that, among those so engaged, was a woman by the name of Rosie Judd. She was living in a tent, a temporary affair, erected for the purpose of use during the hop-picking season. The Indian hop-pickers maintained a camp several hundred yards distant from the tent of the Judd woman.

On the night in question the deceased, Chester C. Rich, who was also a hop-picker and engaged in that work up to the time of the homicide in the Hildreth fields, visited the Judd tent at about ten o’clock on the night of the killing. He was accompanied by one William Mitchell, another hop-picker. Gathered at the…