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79 Ala. 269

McCord v. State

Supreme Court of Alabama

Decided December 15, 1885

Supreme Court of Alabama · decided 1885-12-15

From the County Court of Macon. Tried before the Hon. P. S. Holt. This case originated in the Circuit Court, and was transferred to the County Court.

Relies on Davis v. State · Eubanks v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1885-12-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently August 1982

4 state decisions

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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 →

OLOPTON, J.

¶1An indictment, framed under ' a statute which creates an offense and prescribes its constituent elements, must allege all the circumstances or ingredients, which enter into the essential description of the offense. If the intent is a statutory constituent, not only the acts, in the doing of which the offense consists, but the intent with which they are done, must be alleged. Proof of the intention, without an allegation, is not sufficient.—Eubanks v. State, 17 Ala. 181; 1 Bish. Crim. Proc. § 521; Davis v. State, 68 Ala. 58.

¶2The statute on which the indictment is found declares: “Any person who, knowingly, willfully, and without the consent of the owner thereof, enters upon the lands of another person, and cuts and carries off any timber or rails, with the intention of converting the same to his own use, if the property is of the value of twenty-five dollars or more, is guilty of grand larceny; and if the value of the property is less than twenty-five dollars, the offender is guilty of petit larceny.” Code, § 4360. The evil “intention of converting the same to his own use ” is necessary to convert the prescribed acts into a criihe. The indictment, omitting an allegation of the statutory intention, fails to charge an offense.

¶3Reversed and remanded.

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