State v. Becker

Citations

• 3 S.D. 29
• 51 N.W. 1018
• 1892 S.D. LEXIS 37

Syllabus

<p>1. Section 12, c. 101, Laws 1890, which provides that under certain conditions, therein named, the attorney general shall appoint some reputable attorney tor the purpose of enforcing said law, and that such appointee shall have authority to sign, verify, and file all such complaints, in-formations, indictments, petitions, and papers as the state’s attorney is authorized to sign, etc., and to do any act that such state’s attorney might lawfully do, is not invalid in that it attempts to confer upon the attorney general the power to create a new office.</p> <p>2. The fact that the prosecutor in this case had been so appointed being properly alleged in the information, defendant in error could not, in an issue made by demurrer to the information, raise the question that his authority should be made to appear by evidence other than the averment of the information. The fact of the appointment was admitted by demurring.</p> <p>3. An information in a criminal proceeding in the county court under said chapter 101 may be made by the attorney general or a state’s attorney on his information and belief.</p> <p>4. It is only when the collision between the legislative and the constitutional law is certain and inevitable that the courts feel justified in declaring a law void on that account.</p> <p>5. The object of section 21, art. 3, of the constitution, providing that “no law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in the title,” is to prevent bringing together into one act measures diverse and foreign to each other, with a view of combining the friends of each, and thus to accomplish the passage in one law of the several measures, which could not have passed on their individual merits, and also to prevent the insertion into bills of matter or measures of which the title gave no notice, and thus to deceive and mislead individual legislators and the public generally.</p> <p>6. The disposition of the courts is general to construe this constitutional provis