United States v. Fred Louis Bell and Charles Lavern Beasley

CLARK, Circuit Judge:

This bizarre joint trial bank robbery case presents fourteen points of error from the gratuitous grant of a new trial on a motion for reduction of sentence, which one defendant still disclaims; to the admission of evidence of an airplane hijacking in Canada against the other. After unraveling this tangled web of human misereance and judicial error, we conclude that this case must be affirmed in part and vacated in part.

The convoluted factual matrix of this case had its genesis in the robbery of the Farmers and Merchants State Bank of Ladonia, Texas on August 19, 1968.…