Fealy

The defendant was indicted by the grand jury of Napa County for the crime of “willfully and feloniously burning, injuring, and destroying property with the felonious intent to injure, prejudice, damage, and defraud the insurer” of said property. Thereafter he was put upon his trial thereunder, and was convicted by the jury of the crime as so charged, and he appeals from the judgment of conviction and the order denying him a new trial.

The law upon which the indictment was founded is to be found in section 548 of the Penal Code, whose language is as follows:

Following what is conceived to be the more orderly course in this case, the story of the alleged crime, as it was developed by the evidence, should first briefly be narrated.

It should first be explained that the theory of the people at the trial and in the prosecution of the defendant was that the burning of the building was the climax of a conspiracy concocted by Fealy, his wife, other members of his family, and one Will Dodson, and that the motive for the act was to secure the insurance which had been placed upon the building and its contents.

The crime charged was committed on the twenty-third day of September, 1913, at…