Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

94 Miss. 860

Coleman v. State

Mississippi Supreme Court

Decided March 15, 1909

Mississippi Supreme Court · decided 1909-03-15

From; the circuit court of Covington county. Hon. Robert L. Bullard, Judge. Coleman, appellant, was indicted, tried and convicted of having unlawfully and intentionally pointed and aimed a pistol at and towards one Macqueen, not in necessary self-defense or in the lawful discharge of official duties, etc., and appealed to the supreme court. The indictment charged that Coleman “pointed and aimed” the pistol.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“A statute often makes punishable the doing of one thing, or another, sometimes thus specifying a considerable number of things. Then, by proper and ordinary construction, a person who in one transaction does all violates the statute but once, and incurs only one penalty. Yet he violates it equally by doing one of the things. Therefore the indictment on such a statute may allege, in a single count, that the defendant did as many of the forbidden things as the pleader chooses, employing the conjunction `and' where the statute has `or,' and it will not be double, and it will be established at the trial by proof of any one of them.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including 755 So. 2d 521 - Potts v. State

Relies on Rist v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1909-03-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently August 2016

16 state decisions

60190919101920193019401950196019701980199020002010decided

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.

¶2We do not think there is any substantial distinction between the terms “point” and “aim,” as these words are employed in Code 1906, § 1045. Both words are used in the statute to convey precisely the same meaning; the offense consisting in intentionally so directing a gun or pistol as that its discharge will endanger human life. There is an evident distinction between this statute and the statute on the subject of arson, considered in Rist v. State, 93 Miss. 841, 47 South. 433.

¶3Even if there were some real distinction between these practically synonymous expressions, no error was committed in the *863trial of this case, since it is settled: “A statute often makes punishable the doing of one thing, or another, sometimes thus specifying a considerable number of things. Then, by proper and ordinary construction, a person who in one transaction does all violates the statute but once, and incurs only one penalty Yet he violates it equally by doing one of the things Therefore the indictment on such a statute may allege, in a single count, that the defendant did as many of the forbidden things as the pleader chooses, employing the conjunction “and” where the statute has “or,” and it will not be double, and it will be established at the trial by proof of any one of them.” 1 Bishop’s -Criminal Proc. § 436. Affirmed.

/94/miss/860 · .json · Public domain