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10 Md. 164

Owens v. State

Court of Appeals of Maryland

Decided December 15, 1856

Court of Appeals of Maryland · decided 1856-12-15

The appellant was indicted for being the father of an illigitimate child, begotten and born in the State of Pennsylvania, but now with its mother, residing in Allegany county.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1856-12-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently October 1999

4 state decisions

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Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Mason, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of this court.

¶2The judgment in this casé must be reversed. The case of Oldham vs. The State, 5 Gill, 90, settles the question, that a proceeding of this kind is a criminal proceeding, under the act of 1781, ch. 13, and that its object is to punish “persons guilty of fornication.” In the case referred to, the court emphatically meets the point, raised upon this appeal, (that indemnity to the county was the sole purpose of the law,) when they say, “that the design of the law, in'the punishment inflicted, was to indemnify the county, does not in the least change the character of the proceeding.” ■

¶3Fornication then being the offence designed to be punished, and as the record shows that the offence was perpetrated in the State of Pennsylvania, no indictment will, therefore, lie in this State.

¶4Judgment reversed but no procedendo awarded.

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