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66 Fla. 244

Teston v. State

Supreme Court of Florida

Decided November 4, 1913

Supreme Court of Florida · decided 1913-11-04

<p>An information charging that a man and woman “did then and there live and continue to cohabit with one another as husband and wife, and he, the said T., did then and there have a lawful wife living,” is fatally defective in that, for aught that appears to the contrary the woman named therein was the lawful wife of T. The mation to quash the information should have been granted.</p>

Relies on Ferrell v. State · Cathron v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Judgment reversed · Decided 1913-11-04

How this case has been cited

Cited by 45 later decisions — most recently May 1981 · most notably Fred Howland, Inc. v. Morris (1940), Little v. Butner (1960)

4 federal appellate · 41 state decisions

13019131920193019401950196019701980decided

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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Shackleford, C. J.

¶1Amos C. Teston and Mattie Bridges were tried and convicted upon an information charging that they “did then and there live and continue to cohabit with one another as husband and wife, and he, the said Amos C. Teston, did then and there have a lawful wife living.”

¶2Each of the defendants filed a motion to quash the information on various and sundry grounds and also filed a joint motion in arrest of judgment, all- of which motions were denied. The information was presumably founded upon Section 3526 of the General Statutes of Florida, which reads as follows:

¶3“Whoever, having a former husband or wife living, marries another person, or continues to cohabit with such second husband or wife in this State, shall (except in the *246cases mentioned in the following section) be punished by imprisonment in the State prison not exceeding five years, or in the county jail not exceeding one year, or by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.”

¶4If so, we are of the opinion that it is fatally defective in that, for aught that appears therein to the contrary, the defendant, Mattie Brid-ges, was the lawful wife of the other defendant, Amos C. Teston, who are attempted to be charged with the offense of unlawful continuous cohabitation- As to the requirements for an information or indictment founded on this statute, see Cathron v. State, 40 Fla. 468, 24 South. Rep. 496, and Ferrell v. State, 45 Fla. 26, 34 South. Rep. 220. Examining the information in the light of these two cases, it is obvious that it fails to comply with the requirements therein laid down.

¶5If the information was founded on Section 3518 of the General Statutes of Florida, then it is fatally defective in failing to allege that the defendants lived in an open state of adultery. We would also refer to Tucker v. State, 35 Texas 113, and State v. Clinch, 8 Iowa 401. As the information fails to charge either offenses with the requisite certainty, the motions to quash should have been granted. Having reached this conclusion, it becomes unnecessary to consider the other assignments.

¶6Judgment reversed.

Taylok, Cockrell, Hocker and Whitfield, J. J., concur.
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