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150 Mass. 122

Commonwealth v. Ham

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided November 18, 1889

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1889-11-18

Complaint alleging that George W. Ham, at Haverhill, on June 23, 1888, “ unlawfully did keep intoxicating liquor with intent unlawfully to sell the same in this Commonwealth, he, the said Ham, not being authorized to sell the same in said Common wealth for any purpose or by any legal authority whatever.” Trial in the Superior Court, before Sherman, J., who allowed a bill of exceptions, in substance as follows.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1889-11-18

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently December 1955

13 state decisions

4018891890190019101920193019401950decided

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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Devens, J.

¶1It may well be doubted whether, when a party consents to a verdict of guilty, he does not waive all objections, and whether he is not precluded from prosecuting his exceptions to rulings upon questions of evidence. Without, however, discussing this, it is quite clear that the defendant could not .thus prevent the court from withdrawing from the jury evidence which, on reflection, it deemed should not be considered. The court having announced before the verdict that it should exclude from the case the declaration made by the workman Brown, and should instruct the jury to disregard it, the defendant has no ground of exception on that account, even if it was originally erroneously admitted. Whitney v. Bayley, 4 Allen, 173. Smith v. Whitman, 6 Allen, 562.

¶2It was important to show the intent with which the intoxicating liquor, which the evidence tended to show was found concealed in the defendant’s bottling establishment, was kept. As bearing upon this, the' evidence was competent that an employee of the defendant had been seen with a jug in the building, running from an officer; that a team often about the defendant’s premises, and in possession of the same employee, had been seen delivering jugs at divers places where liquors were sold, and that afterwards there were found in these places jugs containing intoxicating liquors having defendant’s name on cards thereon; that beer teams having the defendant’s name on them were seen about town delivering jugs, and driven by his employees; and that in one instance a similar team with jugs therein was seen driven about the town by the defendant himself. If satisfactory to the jury on this point, it was competent to warrant a verdict against the defendant.

¶3Exceptions overruled.

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