Commonwealth v. Murphy

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided October 15, 1817

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1817-10-15

<p>The credibility of a female witness may properly be impeached, by proving her to be a common prostitute. ■</p>

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“must necessarily have greatly corrupted, if not totally lost, the moral principle.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Commonwealth v. Manning

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1817-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently May 1975

10 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 →

But the Court

¶1overruled the objection, observing that a common prostitute must necessarily have greatly corrupted, if not totally lost, the moral principle, and of course her respect for truth and her regard to the sacredness of an oath. The credibility of a witness may therefore be properly impeached, by proving her to be of such a character.

¶2 Ex relatione Mri. Fuller, (a)

¶3 [This decision has no authority to sustain it. — Bathews vs. Galindo, 6 L. J 133, C. P. — When a witness is called to impeach the character of a former witness as to veracity,"the proper inquiry is, whether the witness called knows the character of the former witness in this regard, and whether the witness called would believe the witness whose veracity is questioned when testifying upon oath. — 1 Starkie, 2 Lond. ed. 182. — 2 Phil. & Am. 925. — Ed.]