Jordt v. State

Decided January 15, 1869

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1869-01-15

The case was tried before Hon. I. B. McFarland, one of the district judges. The defendant was indicted for stealing “ a certain sorrel horse,” &e. The judge charged the jury to determine from the evidence whether the animal stolen was a horse or not. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and sentenced the defendant to five years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary. The witnesses all swore that the animal was a horse, but that he had been gelded.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1869-01-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently December 1922

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Lindsay, J.

¶1—The appellant in this case was indicted for stealing a horse. The proof showed that the property taken was a gelding, an animal- which may be, like all eunuchs, of no sex. The Criminal Code provides that where words in the masculine gender are used in the penal statutes of the State, they shall include the feminine also. This case does not come within the category of that general, provision, for a gelding is neither the one nor the other. The term is used in the statute upon which this indictment was founded distinctively from the word horse, and a conviction for the theft of a horse, upon the proof of taking feloniously a gelding, would be as incongruous as that of stealing a mule or an ass upon a similar indictment.

¶2If the theft of a specific domestic animal was committed, it should have been correctly charged in the indictment. For the error of the court in refusing a new trial the judgment is reversed, and the cause remanded.

¶3Reversed and remanded.