Commonwealth v. Cleary

Decided November 25, 1890

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1890-11-25

Two complaints, charging the defendant with keeping intoxicating liquors with intent unlawfully to sell the same. At the trial in the Superior Court, on appeal, before Dewey, J., the government offered evidence of two seizures of intoxicating liquors upon the premises occupied by the defendant’s family.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1890-11-25

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently April 1916

5 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.

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Holmes, J.

¶11. The defendant’s offer to prove by his wife that he showed her that he was opposed to her owning and having intoxicating liquors, was allowed by the presiding judge so far .as it related to acts. So far as it related to the effect of private *493conversations between tbe two, tbe only legal way of proving this was by proving the substance of the words spoken. As the defendant was not at liberty to prove the latter, he could not prove the former. Pub. Sts. c. 169, § 18, cl. 1.

¶22. Evidence of the defendant’s acts after the last seizure was inadmissible. He could not make evidence for himself in that way. Exceptions overruled.