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242 Ark. 461

Perryman v. State

Supreme Court of Arkansas

Decided May 1, 1967

Supreme Court of Arkansas · decided 1967-05-01

Relies on Harris v. State · Board of Conference v. Phillips · City Nat. Bank v. Pigg

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1967-05-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently March 2002

7 state decisions

2019671970198019902000decided

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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George Rose Smith, Justice.

¶1The appellant was convicted of having indecently exposed himself to a girl under the age of sixteen. Ark. Stat. Ann. §§ 41-1127 and -1129 (Repl. 1964). The jury fixed his punishment at imprisonment for six months. 'The testimony of the prosecuting witness and of another high school student who was present when the incident occurred was amply sufficient to support the verdict.

¶2The court did not err in allowing the fifteen-year-old prosecutrix to testify. In criminal cases the trial judge is given wide discretion in determining the competency of a minor as a witness. Harris v. State, 238 Ark. 780, 384 S. W. 2d 477 (1964). There was no abuse of discretion here. Quite the opposite, the record suggests no basis for questioning the competency of this witness. Nor did the court err in refusing to permit defense counsel to delay his opening statement to the jury until the State had rested its case. That exact point was decided in McDaniels v. State, 187 Ark. 1163 (mem.), 63 S. W. 2d 335 (1933).

¶3Affirmed.

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