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22 Ala. App. 375

115 So 848

Dickey v. State

Alabama Court of Appeals

Decided March 20, 1928

Alabama Court of Appeals · decided 1928-03-20

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1928-03-20

How this case has been cited

Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently December 1973

11 state decisions

70192819301940195019601970decided

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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RICE, J.

¶1 The court has read the entire evidence in this case, sitting in banc. We are of the opinion that appellant’s motion for a new trial should have been granted. And this on the ground of the insufficiency of the evidence to sustain the conviction. The books are full of cases in which it has been held, axiomatically, it is true, that the same rules of-evidence apply in prosecutions for violations of our prohibition statutes that apply in prosecutions for other criminal offenses. And where the evidence, as here, in a prosecution for distilling prohibited liquors, or for unlawfully being in possession of a still, etc., to be used for the purpose of manufacturing prohibited liquors, shows no more than that defendant was present at a still, not upon his premises, and that he caught in a bottle some of the whisky coming from the still, and tast *376 ed it, and that he ran upon the approach of the officers, we think a conviction ought not to stand. Upon proof no stronger it would not stand for the conviction, of'any other offense. We realize there is a possibility, even probability, that appellant is guilty. But our judicial safeguards have been bought at too dear a price to be stricken down in order that some guilty person may not escape.

¶2 For the error in overruling appellant’s motion for a new trial, the judgment is reversed, and the cause remanded.

¶3 Reversed and remanded.

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