State v. Harries

OPINION

FONES, Chief Justice.

Defendant appeals from a conviction of murder in the first degree and sentence of death.

This case is unusual in that defendant testified that he killed the victim in the course of robbing a Jiffy Market in Kings-port. While his appointed counsel resisted vigorously every aspect of the State’s case, the only defense affirmatively asserted was that defendant was a drug addict, being manipulated by Ralph Page and Charles Stapleton, his drug suppliers, and that the bullet that killed the eighteen-year-old clerk in the Jiffy Market was fired accidentally. It was…