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94 Miss. 104

Frost v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1908

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1908-10-15

From tbe circuit court of Wayne county. Hon. W. IT. Hardy, Judge. Held: as an inference, that she could not be unchaste at such a tender age. But this should not change the rule that there should be strict compliance with the terms and provisions of the statute law in the framing of indictments based thereon. It must be admitted that the testimony of the grandmother of the prosecutrix was incompetent.

Relies on Anderson v. State · Ashford v. State · Jeffries v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1908-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently February 1981

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.

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Fletcher, I.,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2Upon a prosecution for attempt to rape where there was a sharp conflict in the testimony, the court, over the objection of defendant, permitted the grandmother of the prosecutrix to detail the particulars of the affair as narrated to her by the prosecutrix shortly after the alleged assault. This has been repeatedly and emphatically condemned by this court, and this error has invariably resulted in reversal. Ashford v. State, 81 Miss. 414, 33 South. 174; Anderson v. State, 82 Miss. 784, 35 South. 202; Jeffries v. State, 89 Miss. 643, 42 South. 801; Dickey v. State, 86 Miss. 525, 38 South. 776. We sincerely hope that these cases will be carefully re-read by judges and prosecuting attorneys, that there may be an end to this familiar form of reversible error.

¶3While this is sufficient to reverse the case, yet, since the case must be retried, we call attention to another manifest error in the conduct of the trial. This indictment was drawn under section 1049 of the Code of 1906, and charged accurately enough an offense under this statute. There was no averment in the indictment as to the previous chaste character of the female, and yet the court charged, in the fifth instruction given for the state, that the jury might fix the'penalty and the number of years of imprisonment in the penitentiary, if the jury thought proper so to do. The jury, responding to this instruction, actually fixed the *107penalty at ten years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary. This proceeding .was, of course, based upon section 1359 of tbe Code of 1906, applying only to cases where the female is of previous chaste character. In order to convict under this statute, the indictment must allege the previous chastity of the female assaulted.

¶4Beversed and remanded.

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