Peoples v. State

SIMPSON, Justice.

Appeal by Mary Lee Peoples from a sentence of life imprisonment in the penitentiary' and the overruling of her motion for a new trial after conviction of murder in the first degree for the killing of Raphel Peoples, an eight-year-old boy, by shooting him with a .22 caliber rifle.

The theory of the State’s case was that the defendant, in a fit of anger, struck the deceased with a piece of stovewood and then, becoming frightened when the child staggered out of the house into the back yard and fell, she shot him in the back of the head with the rifle. The tendency of the State’s…