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94 Miss. 225

Bacot v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided October 15, 1908

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1908-10-15

Prom the circuit court of Pike county. Hon. Moyse H. Wilkinson, Judge. Bacot, appellant, was indicted and tried for the unlawful sale of intoxicating liquors, convicted, fined, sentenced to imprisonment, and appealed to the supreme court The evidence for the state showed that appellant sold a beverage, kept by him in a barrel in his store, called “Phosphate;” that it intoxicated, those who drank it.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“Aside from the [well-known] exception in the case of pharmaceutical preparations, the law punishes the fact of selling intoxicants, regardless of the intent of the seller. He must see to it that the beverages he dispenses are non-alcoholic to the extent that intoxication in any degree will not be produced by even excessive consumption of the beverage... . ( 94 Miss. at 227 , 48 So. at 228 ).”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Jones v. State

Relies on Bertrand v. State · King v. State · Goode v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1908-10-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently November 1973

1 federal appellate · 7 state decisions

4019081910192019301940195019601970decided

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 →

Fletcher, J".,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2This case is totally unlike the cases of King v. State, 58 Miss. 737, 38 Am. Rep. 344; Bertrand v. State, 73 Miss. 51, 18 South. 545, and Goode v. State, 87 Miss. 495, 40 South. 12, cases dealing with the sale of compounds to be used exclusively for medical purposes. In that class of cases the substance was not offered for sale as a beverage, but as a medicine, and the good faith of the merchant was properly in issue. But in this case the so-called “phosphate” was kept for sale and sold as á beverage, and in such cases the seller must take the risk and bear the consequences if the fluid dispensed is in fact intoxicating. Aside from the well-known exception in the case of pharmaceutical preparations, the law punishes the fact of selling intoxicants, regardless of the intent of the seller. He must see to it that the beverages he dispenses are non-alcoholic to the extent that intoxication in any degree will not be produced by even excessive consumption of the beverage. The circuit court was correct in excluding evidence and refusing instructions relative to the good faith of the appellant.

¶3We take occasion to say that the sale of intoxicating liquors, although disguised under unusual names and unfamiliar labels, will not be encouraged by this court.

¶4Affirmed.

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