State of Oregon v. Garver

The defendant, Robert Edgar Carver, has appealed from a conviction of first degree murder. The jury, by its verdict, did not recommend life imprisonment, and the death penalty followed as a matter of course.

The indictment charged Carver and two others, Norman Carroll Andrus and Leland Delbert Marshall, with shooting and killing one Ancell Abbott in the course of an attempt to commit the crime of assault and robbery being armed with a dangerous weapon.

The proof showed that on the early evening of January 3, 1949, Garver, then twenty-four years of age, met his accomplices in a tavern in…