Hall

Defendant was charged by information with murder. 1 (Pen. Code, § 187.) He waived a jury trial, and the court found him guilty of murder in the second degree. (Pen. Code, § 189.) He appeals from the judgment 2 on the ground that the evidence is insufficient to support it.

Just before noon on Saturday, May 19, 1962, a resident of a one-story hotel in Los Angeles noticed blood at various points along the hallway. He pushed open the door of the kitchen used by all the residents of the hotel and, without entering, saw Ethel Mae Johnson lying in blood on the floor. He went to the porch and asked a passing female neighbor to call the police. When officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they found the decedent nude with a curtain rod and cloth loosely wrapped around her neck and a bloody rag across her midsection. She had been stabbed 49 times.

There was a considerable amount of blood in the kitchen, two spots in an adjacent room that the decedent shared with her lover, a trail of blood leading diagonally across the hall, and blood smears elsewhere on the floor and walls of the hallway. The investigating officers noticed two soleprints and two heelprints made by…

I dissent. I do not believe that the follow ing statement in the majority opinion is an accurate statement of the law: “To justify a criminal conviction, the trier of *113 fact must be reasonably persuaded to a near certainty. The trier must therefore have reasonably rejected all that undermines confidence.” (Italics added.)

It is my understanding that in a criminal case all that is necessary for a conviction is evidence that convinces the minds of those charged with passing upon the facts, and satisfies their consciences, that the defendant is guilty.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not require proof to a mathematical certainty or proof which excludes a possible doubt. (Code Civ. Proc., § 1826.)

Section 1826 of the Code of Civil Procedure reads: “The law does not require demonstration; that is, such a degree of proof as, excluding possibility of error, produces absolute certainty; because such proof is rarely possible. Moral certainty only is required, or that degree of proof which produces conviction in an unprejudiced mind.” (See People v. Ah Sun, 160 Cal. 788, 791 [ 118 P. 240 ]; People v. Brotherton, 47 Cal. 388, 406 .)

I would affirm the judgment for the reasons…