Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

43 Tex. 346

Moffit v. State

Texas Supreme Court

Decided July 1, 1875

Texas Supreme Court · decided 1875-07-01

<p>Appeal from Bell. Tried below before the Hon. J. P. Osterhout.</p>

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1875-07-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently March 1960

5 state decisions

201875188018901900191019201930194019501960decided

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 →

Roberts, Chief Justice.

¶1This indictment is bad, because stating that the defendant did designedly make an obscene and indecent exhibition of his own person “ in a public place, to wit: on a public road,” as. expressed in the indictment, is not tantamount to stating that he did designedly make an obscene and indecent exhibition pf his own person “in public,” as expressed in the code. (Paschal’s Dig., art. 2030.).

¶2The publicity contemplated in the code has reference to persons who do or can see it rather than to the place. A public road in the night-time or in a remote and unfrequented part of the country may be, and often is, such a place as that such an exhibition might be there made without its being made “ in public,” in the obvious meaning *347of the law. On the other hand, the place may itself be private, and yet the person be so exhibited to public view as to be an exhibition of the person “ in public” in the meaning of the law.

¶3In indictments of offenses of this character it is generally sufficient and proper that the language of the statute should be followed, nothing more nor less.

¶4Judgment affirmed.

¶5Affirmed.

/43/tex/346 · .json · Public domain