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138 Mass. 182

Commonwealth v. Deegan

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided November 26, 1884

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1884-11-26

<p>If pigeons are stolen from the house in which they were confined by the owner, and are found in the possession of a person who bought them of another about two weeks after the larceny, the latter may he convicted of such larceny, if his possession of the pigeons is not satisfactorily explained.</p>

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1884-11-26

How this case has been cited

Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently May 2004

6 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.

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Field, J.

¶1There was evidence under each count, that the pigeons had been stolen by some person, and the possession by the defendant was sufficiently recent to be evidence that he was the person who stole them, unless it was satisfactorily explained. The whole ruling asked for ought not, therefore, to have been given.

¶2The defendant now insists that recent possession by the defendant is not evidence of the larceny, but only evidence that, if the larceny is otherwise proved, the defendant is the person who committed it. But this was not submitted to the court as a distinct proposition, and the court seems to have ruled in accordance with this view of the law, because it instructed the jury “as to the effect of the recent possession by the defendant of the property, if stolen, .... in a manner not excepted to, except as it was inconsistent with the said prayers of the defendant.” Exceptions overruled.

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