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100 Ala. 23

Nichols v. State

Supreme Court of Alabama

Decided November 15, 1893

Supreme Court of Alabama · decided 1893-11-15

From the Circuit Court of Butler. Tried before the Honorable John R. Tyson. The defendant was tried under an indictment charging him with carrying a pistol concealed about his person; the State examined a witness who testified that he was a member of the grand jury for Butler county, and that during the session of the court he met the defendant in the hallway of the courthouse and shook hands with him.

Relies on Ayers v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1893-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently September 1968

15 state decisions

5018931900191019201930194019501960decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

McCLELLAN, J.

¶1The inquiry being whether at a given time and place the defendant carried a pistol concealed about his person and there being' evidence tending to show that at such time and place he did carry a pistol concealed about his person, he offered to show that at another place in the vicinity, i. e. in the same town, during the same week or rather, “during that term of the court,” the defendant had a pistol which was not concealed. This testimony was properly excluded. The fact that the defendant “had a pistol,” it not appearing even that he had it “about his person” which was not concealed at one time and. place manifestly involves no tendency to show that he did not carry it concealed about his person at a different time and place. All that this testimony tended to prove was that the defendant had in his possession a pistol which may not have been on his person at all. And we are not prepared to say that the testimony would have been evidence even had it gone further and shown that at the time in question the defendant carried the pistol openly about his person, though it probably would have been competent had it identified the time as being just before or just after that to which the State’s evidence related, or had it tended to show defendant’s habit, covering the time, to carry a pistol openly on his person, tli > evidence for the State not being such as to wholly exclude the idea that the weapon was so carried at the time referred to by its witness. .

¶2The court also properly excluded the proposed testimony of the defendant that “the pistol could have been seen by ordinary observation.” This was the mere opinion or conclusion of the witness from facts capable of being put before the jury, and from which it was their right and duty, unaided by the mental processes of the witness, to draw whatever conclusion was justified in the premises.

¶3“A reasonable possibility” is, and in the nature of things can be, no more or less than a possibility; and a possibility of innocence does not require and will.not justify acquittal. The charge requested by the defendent was well refused. Sims v. State ante page 23.

¶4There was a verdict of guilty, the assessment of a fine by the jury, and a recital of confession of judgment for fine and costs by defendant and sureties in this case, but there was no judgment of guilt. There was in other words, no *26judgment, from which an appeal would lie, in the court below. Ayers v. State, 71 Ala. 11. This appeal must therefore be dismissed.

¶5Appeal dismissed.

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