Ex parte Willke

Citations

• 34 Tex. 155

Syllabus

<p>A person being; charged with the theft of eleven doors, it was proved that the doors, when taken from the owner, were fastened by hinges to her unoccupied house, and that the accused soon afterwards sold them in a neighboring village. There was no evidence as to the person by whom they were taken from their hinges. Held, on habeas corpus, that though the doors were part of the realty and not the subject matter of theft as long as they were attached to the house, yet, when severed from the house, they became personal property, and as such they were the subject matter of theft; and even if it had been proved that they were taken from their hinges by the accused, yet his subsequent asportation and conversion of them, without the owner’s consent and with the intent to deprive her of their value, constituted theft in a legal as well as a moral sense—and not a mere trespass.</p>