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89 Miss. 666

Kittrell v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided November 15, 1906

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1906-11-15

From tbe circuit court of Greene county. ITon. William H. Hardy, Judge. Kittrell, tbe appellant, and a negro named Johnson were jointly indicted, and appellant was separately tried and convicted for unlawfully selling intoxicants, fined $500, and appealed to the supreme court. Appellant carried on a mercantile business in the village of State Line, but was absent from his store a considerable part of the time.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1906-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently August 1982

10 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.

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Calhoon, J.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2The indictment is based solely on the ground that the defendant “did unlawfully sell and retail intoxicating liquors without license.” When this trial was had (August, 1906) it was well settled that the defendant had the right to demand that the court *670compel the state to elect the particular sale on which it relied, and confine its testimony to that. The following are some of the cases so holding: Ware v. State, 71 Miss., 204 (s.c., 13 South. Rep., 936); King v. State, 66 Miss., 508 (s.c., 6 South. Rep., 188); Bailey v. State, 67 Miss., 334 (s.c., 7 South. Rep., 348) ; Newman v. State, 72 Miss., 126 (s.c., 16 South. Rep., 232) ; Naul v. McGomb City, 70 Miss., 699 (s.c., 12 South. Rep., 903). In the case before us the court below refused to so compel the state, and this was error. Code 1906, § 1762, changes the rule, but this cannot affect the previous trials.

¶3The court below was right in overruling the motion to exclude the state’s evidence because of variance between allegations of the indictment and the proof. One who aids and abets in the commission of a misdemeanor is indictable as a principal, and there was evidence tending to show such aiding and abetting. Beck v. State, 69 Miss., 217 (s.c., 13 South. Rep., 835) ; Wynn v. State, 63 Miss., 260.

¶4Kittrell kept, in the building in which the liquor was said to have been sold, a general mercantile business, and was there only about once a week; he having another business six miles away, where he chiefly was. The sales were by a negro, who, Kittrell says, had nothing to do with the store, and that he (Kittrell) had no knowledge of any sale; and so, under the evidence for defense, which it was for the jury to consider, it was error to give the first charge for the state. That required conviction if the negro was permitted to sell by agents or clerks, even without the knowledge of Kittrell. If this be the law, any citizen may be criminally guilty, where a servant makes a furtive sale of liquor. '

¶5Reversed and remanded.

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