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69 Md. 511

Boyland v. State

Court of Appeals of Maryland

Decided December 6, 1888

Court of Appeals of Maryland · decided 1888-12-06

The appellant was convicted in the Court below on an indictment, charging him in the first count with unlawfully soiling a lottery ticket to Maria Clagett, and in the second count with unlawfully keeping a room fertile purpose of selling lottery tickets, and in the third count with knowingly permitting a certain room, of which he was the owner, to be used as a place for selling lottery tickets. The case is further stated in the opinion of this Court.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

““The real and only question presented to us is whether the appellant can legalize an illegal act by calling it by another name, and that all the courts of justice in the land are bound to regard the act itself what he may choose to call it.””

quoted by 1 later decision, including Duckworth v. Deane

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1888-12-06

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently July 2006

11 state decisions

301888189019001910192019301940195019601970198019902000decided

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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Stone, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the Court.

¶2The appellant was indicted for selling lottery tickets .to the witness, Maria Clagett. She proved substantially that she bought the. tickets from the appellant, as “policy” tickets, and paid nine cents for them, and if she won she would get three dollars and sixty cents. Upon cross-examination she said she did not know' whether the numbers on her tickets represented the numbers in a horse race or not.

¶3The tickets she bought were headed “Horse combination” and endorsed “decided to be legal by the highest tribunal in the State of Maryland, ” and the appellant insists that it was betting on a horse yace, and not lottery vending.

¶4If the heading and endorsement were stricken from these tickets they would represent lottery tickets, owhat is the same thing policy tickets. The real and only question presented to us, is whether the appellant can legalize an illegal act by calling it by another name, and that all the Courts of justice in the land are bound to regard the act itself what he may choose to call it. If such he the law the Courts of criminal jurisdiction may as well be closed.

¶5The heading and endorsement on these tickets were a patent effort to evade the law against selling lottery tickets, the tickets were clearly admissible in evidence, and the jury had the undoubted right, disregarding the *513name and endorsement printed on them by the appellant, to find them, what they really were, lottery tickets, and not, what they professed to be, tickets upon ahorse combination.

(Decided 6th December, 1888.)

¶6Judgment affirmed.

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