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102 Miss. 661

State v. Brooks

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1912

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1912-10-15

Hon. Monroe McClurg, Judge. Stanley Brooks was acquitted on a trial for crime and the state appeals. The facts are fully stated in the opinion of the court. No brief of counsel on either side found in the record.

Relies on State v. Willingham

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1912-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently August 1992

24 state decisions

80191219201930194019501960197019801990decided

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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Cook, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court..

¶2This is an appeal by the state from the action of the circuit court in instructing the jury to find the defendant not guilty.

¶3*662When the state closed its evidence, the court excluded the testimony, upon the motion of defendant, and directed the jury to acquit the defendant. “No question of law is presented by this record, but a decision of the court merely passing upon the sufficiency of the proof to sustain a conviction. In such state of case there is no warrant of law for the taking of an appeal by the state.” This is the language of Judge Truly, speaking for the court, in the case of State v. Willingham et al., 86 Miss. 203, 38 South. 334. The statute construed in that case was section 39, Code 1892. Section 40, Code 1906, under which this appeal is prosecuted, is a transcript of the law of 1892.

¶4Experimental appeals by the state are not authorized by the statute, and this court is not required to read the evidence taken in the trial court to ascertain whether, taken as a whole, the jury would have been warranted in finding the defendant guilty. This would be'a waste of the court’s time, which could be more profitably employed in the investigation of real lawsuits.

¶5The following appeals are. in the same category, viz.: State v. R. C. Wilkerson, 59 South. 830; State v. J. J. Olive, 59 South. 830.

¶6Wherefore the appeals of all are dismissed.

¶7Appeal dismissed.

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