¶1By the St. of 1869, c. 410, entitled “ an act to establish certain rules for .the construction of repealing statutes,” it is enacted that “in the construction of all statutes hereafter enacted the following rules shall be observed, unless such construction would be repugnant to the express terms of the same statute.”- The general rules so established are to be deemed part of every repealing statute since passed, as much as if expressly inserted therein, unless the later statute clearly manifests a different intention. One of these rules is that the repeal of an act shall not affect any prosecution pending at the time of the repeal for an. offence committed under the act repealed. The St. of 1876, c. 172, § 4, which simply enacts that the St. of 1874, c. 856, “ is hereby repealed,” does not therefore affect this prosecution, which was pending under the St. of 1874 when the_St. of 1876 was passed. ¡Exceptions overruled.
123 Mass. 407
Commonwealth v. Desmond
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
Decided November 8, 1877
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1877-11-08
Indictment on the St. of 1874, c. 356, for illegal voting, found by the grand jury empanelled at January term 1876 of the Superior Court. After a verdict of guilty, the defendant, at January term 1877, moved in arrest of judgment, for the reason that “ the statute, under which the indictment was framed, was repealed by the St. of 1876, c. 172,” passed April 26, 1876. The motion was overruled; and the defendant alleged exceptions.
Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 1877-11-08
How this case has been cited
Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently July 1963
6 state decisions
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 →