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103 Ga. App. 743

120 S.E.2d 359

Mathews v. State

Court of Appeals of Georgia

Decided May 24, 1961

Court of Appeals of Georgia · decided 1961-05-24

Relies on Carrigan v. State · Stanford v. State · Eden v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1961-05-24

How this case has been cited

Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently November 1981

12 state decisions

90196119701980decided

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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Jordan, Judge.

¶1 John J. Mathews was tried and convicted in the Superior Court of Clayton County for the offense of burglary. His motion for a new trial on the general and two special grounds was denied, and the exception-is to that judgment. Held:

¶2 1. The first special ground of the amended motion for new trial contends that the court erred in refusing to declare a mistrial for the reason that the answer of a witness for the State to a question propounded to him by the solicitor-general put the defendant’s character in issue when he had not done so himself. The witness, O. W. Allen, a detective with the Atlanta Police Department, in answer to the question, “State to the court your purpose of going to his [the defendant’s] home,” testified as follows: “We went to his home looking for some stolen goods.” Since the court promptly sustained the objection of counsel for the defendant to this testimony and ruled out the question and answer objected to, and instructed the jury not to consider the witness’s testimony, this ground is without merit. Carrigan v. State, 206 Ga. 707 (2) (58 S. E. 2d 407); Stanford v. State, 201 Ga. 173 (2) (38 S. E. 2d 823); Eden v. State, 43 Ga. App. 414 (1) (159 S. E. 134).

¶3 2. Where stolen goods are found in the possession of the defendant charged with burglary, recently after the commission of the offense, that fact would authorize the jury to infer that the accused was guilty, unless he explained his possession to their satisfaction. Morris v. State, 47 Ga. App. 792, 795 (171 S. E. 555). Special ground 2 which assigns error on that portion of the court’s charge, which embodied this principle ■ of law, is without merit.

¶4 3. The general grounds of the motion for new trial, not having been referred to or argued by counsel for the defendant, are considered abandoned.

¶5 Judgment affirmed.

Townsend, P. J., and Frankum, J., concur.
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