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121 Mass. 45

Commonwealth v. Bowers

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided October 20, 1876

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1876-10-20

Indictment against Herbert M. Bowers and Ellen C. Newton, for adultery on November 2,1875.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1876-10-20

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently March 1967

5 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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Endicott, J.

¶1The defendants were discovered in the bedroom of a hotel at midnight, under circumstances which, if unexplained, would warrant a jury in finding them guilty of the offence charged.

¶2The conversation offered in evidence was properly excluded at the trial. It was not in reply to any evidence introduced by the government, but to meet the position taken by the district attorney, that the defendants left their homes in Greenfield and went to Shelburne Falls, “for an adulterous purpose.” This was in the nature of an argument upon the evidence presented. Whether they went there for an adulterous purpose is entirely immaterial to the defence. If they did not, but went for another purpose, that fact would have no tendency to explain the position in which the officer found them.

¶3*47The ruling that permitted the defendants to show that they went with the advice of the mother of the male defendant was sufficiently favorable. Exceptions overruled.

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