People v. Kelley

The defendant was indicted for the murder of Mrs. Myrtle Mellus. The jury returned a verdict of murder of the first degree, without recommendation. The court below denied a motion for a new trial, and pronounced sentence and judgment imposing the death penalty, whereupon the defendant appealed from the judgment of conviction and from the order denying him a new trial.

The decedent, a married woman, forty-three years old at the time of her death, although residing with her husband, had maintained illicit intimacy with the appellant, much younger, for a period of four or five years. The…