Corpus Delicti: Three Unusual Colorado Cases
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 38 No. 3 Pg. 83 |
| Pages | 83 |
| Publication year | 2009 |
2009, March, Pg. 83. Corpus Delicti: Three Unusual Colorado Cases
March 2009
Vol. 38, No. 3 [Page 83]
About the Author
Frank Gibbard is a staff attorney with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and Secretary of the Tenth Circuit Historical Society, (303) 844-5306, frank_gibbard@ca10.uscourts.gov. The views expressed are those of the author and not of the Tenth Circuit or its judges. The author is grateful for the research assistance of Dan Cordova and Lynn Christian of the Colorado Supreme Court Law Library. Readers are encouraged to contact Frank Gibbard with topic suggestions or to volunteer to write Historical Perspective articles.
A common misconception concerning the principle of corpus delicti is that the prosecution is required to produce the body of the deceased to obtain a conviction for murder; however, this is incorrect.(fn1) The word "corpus" does not refer to the victim's dead body; it refers to the "body" of the crime, that is, the evidence that a crime took place.(fn2) In the case of a homicide, it usually requires "evidence of a death and of a criminal agency as its cause."(fn3)
In each of the following three Colorado cases, the existence of a body was not the problem for the state's case; there was in fact a body in each case, and there was no question about the decedent's identity or the fact that he or she had died. However, corpus delicti was still at issue, because the cause of death was in question.
Before the age of modern crime scene analysis and forensic science, law enforcement officials had fewer tools to determine the precise cause of death. These decisions demonstrate that the Colorado courts still applied the principle of corpus delicti to hold the prosecution to an exacting standard of proof on the question of whether the decedent's death actually resulted from a homicide.
The first case, McBride v. People,(fn4) dates from 1891, when modern medical science was still in its infancy.(fn5) Mr. and Mrs. Edward McBride ran a grocery store in Arapahoe County where they sold beer and hard liquor. They had a lamentable tendency to consume the inventory. In the words of the Colorado Court of Appeals, they were "confirmed inebriates" who for a number of years had a habit of getting "stupidly drunk, sometimes jointly or in company with each other, and at other times individually and separately."(fn6)
When they were drunk "jointly or in company with each other," they turned to quarreling and violence. Any nearby object could serve as a missile. They threw cups, bottles, sticks, even brickbats, at each other. There was no evidence that any of Edward McBride's missiles ever hit his target;(fn7) still, testimony concerning his projectile behavior and aptitude was elicited from several witnesses at his subsequent trial for murdering Mrs. McBride.
Mrs. McBride's "individual and separate" drinking bouts were as dangerous to herself as those she engaged in with her husband, perhaps even more so. Toward the end of her life, she was almost always drunk, sometimes helplessly so. She had a series of nasty falls, including one time when she tumbled down some cellar stairs. On another occasion, she was found passed out "some distance from the house, in a ravine, without cover or consciousness, in cold, inclement weather."(fn8) Her final act of excess, culminating in confinement to her deathbed, consisted of drinking two gallons of hard liquor during a two-week period without any other form of nourishment.
Dr. Bilby, who was summoned to Mrs. McBride's bedside, testified that when he observed her, she was vomiting blood and her throat looked like she had been drinking carbolic acid. She was pale, emaciated, and suffering from abdominal pain. He saw her five times between December 28 and New Year's Eve 1891, the day she died.
In addition to her inflamed throat, the doctor noted the presence of several bruises on her body. Her 12-year-old son later testified that Edward McBride had assaulted his mother a few weeks before her death, hitting her with a boot and shoving her out the door. When asked about the cause of death, Dr. Bilby testified that it resulted from "[l]ack of nutrition and loss of blood, caused by some internal injury."(fn9) He further stated that the internal injury had been caused by blows delivered to her exterior.
Other medical testimony, delivered by a physician who autopsied Mrs. McBride, was more favorable to her husband. Dr. R. B. Knight found no rupture of her internal organs. However, he did find plenty of other medical problems: she had an old inflammation of the mitral valve of her heart; she was in the last stages of Bright's disease;(fn10) and she was hemorrhaging blood from her nostrils, which settled in her stomach and was then "thrown off by vomiting."(fn11) None of the bruises on her body would have resulted in internal injuries, Dr. Knight testified. Even assuming she was violently assaulted before her death, he opined, the death itself resulted not from a beating but from exhaustion, chronic alcoholism, and Bright's disease.
The prosecution presented evidence of statements made by Mrs. McBride before her death. When Dr. Bilby asked her "what brought you on," she told him that her husband had struck her with his fists, knocked her down, jumped on her, and kicked her.(fn12) These statements were hearsay, of course, but they were admitted at trial as her dying declaration.(fn13) Other witnesses testified that she knew she was dying, and that she blamed her husband for killing her.
The jury convicted Edward McBride of second-degree murder, and he received a life sentence. On appeal, he argued that it had been improper to introduce evidence of his previous, nonfatal...
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