Wadley v. State

Citations

• 96 Miss. 77
• 50 So. 494

Syllabus

<p>1. Ceimestai. Law and Pkocedube. Unlawful sale of intoxicating liquors. Autrefois convict. Pleading, out of time. Q-eneral rule. Exception. Delay accounted for.</p> <p>While the better practice is to require special pleas in criminal cases to he filed before the beginning of the trial, a defendant indicted for the unlawful sale of intoxicating liquors should not be precluded from pleading a former conviction, as being out of time, because he did not offer his plea until he had gone to trial and . the state had offered its evidence, where the indictment charged the offense to have been committed in a designated year, ' without specifying the day or the month, and the date of the sale counted upon for a conviction was not developed or known to the defendant until the introduction of the state’s testimony.</p> <p>2. Same. Same. Code 1906, § 1702. Sufficiency of plea of autrefois convict.</p> <p>Under Code 1906, § 1762, providing that, on trial for violating the liquor laws, the state may give evidence of any one or more offenses of the same character committed before the date laid in the indictment, but in such case, after conviction or acquittal, accused shall not be liable for prosecution for any offenses of the same character before the date laid in the indictment, a plea of former conviction, alleging that accused had been convicted of unlawfully selling intoxicating liquor, filed on the trial of an indictment which left blank the date of a similar offense, is good as against a demurrer; for the question whether the state on the former trial availed itself of the privilege of the statute is a matter of proof, although a plea of guilty was entered on the former trial.</p>