People ex rel. Mixer v. Board of Supervisors of Manistee County

• Decision Date: 17 January 1873
• Citation: 26 Mich. 422
• Court: Michigan Supreme Court
• Parties: The People on the relation of Phineas Mixer v. The Board of Supervisors of Manistee County

26 Mich. 422

The People on the relation of Phineas Mixer v. The Board of Supervisors of Manistee County

Supreme Court of Michigan

January 17, 1873

Heard January 14, 1873

Application for mandamus.

E. E Benedict, for the relator.

B. M Cutcheon, for the respondents.

OPINION

Campbell, J.:

Relator seeks a mandamus to obtain audit and allowances of certain claims against Manistee county, which respondents have not allowed.

These consist of several classes of claims, and are set forth as included within the following heads, for:

First. The confinement of persons brought to jail by the city police officers of Manistee, charged with being drunk and disorderly, contrary to the city ordinances, and temporarily confined without commitment until fit to be brought before a magistrate; and also the imprisonment of various persons convicted of violating the city ordinances against drunkenness and disorderly conduct. These items are charged at three hundred and forty-eight dollars and ninety-seven cents.

Second. Arresting and detaining prisoners and subpoenaing witnesses under the liquor law, forty-eight dollars and twenty-six cents.

Third. Summoning jurors and attending probate court on trial of offenses under the law prohibiting the sale of adulterated liquors, forty dollars and twenty cents. Fourth. Hiring guns and pistols in anticipation of a riot, eleven dollars and thirty-five cents.

Fifth. Office rent, thirty-four dollars.

The first class of charges, for services under the city ordinances, we think cannot be reckoned as county charges. They are in no sense services rendered to the county, and there is no statute which requires the county to pay for them. City by-laws and ordinances are entirely of local application, and are intended for local benefit. They are passed by a body independent of the county, and in whose action the county has no voice. The suppression of crime and disorder is made chargeable on the county in many cases, not so much because the county, as such, is concerned, as because the county is the division of country set apart for all ordinary jurisdiction in criminal matters, and the expenses have been usually apportioned over the region in which such courts and their juries act. But the municipal expenses of city police matters have been quite as uniformly made chargeable to the city itself, and in the absence of any statute to the contrary, such must be the rule of law.

The only suggestion to the contrary is based on the charter of Manistee, allowing or requiring offenders convicted under city ordinances to be confined in the county jail; coupled with the statute which makes fees in criminal cases chargeable to the county: 2 Comp. L. 1871, ch. 240, p. 2060-1.

The term "criminal cases," used in the laws, refers to none but prosecutions under the state laws. In Jackson v People, 8 Mich. 262, and People v. Jackson, 8 Mich. 110, we held that cases under city ordinances could not be brought into this court by writ of error, or exceptions, but must come up on certiorari. They resemble criminal cases only in being penal proceedings, but no offense is a crime which does not violate the law of the land. The prosecutions in those cases which gave rise to the controversy in County of Wayne v. City of Detroit, 17 Mich. 390, and People v. Controller of Detroit, 18 Mich. 445, were had before the police justice, on charges which were put under his jurisdiction directly, and in terms, by the charter of Detroit, which is a state law, and not merely by ordinances passed under it, and were offenses against the general laws of the state, which we held did not cease to be such because the city saw fit to prohibit them by ordinance. The jurisdiction to punish them, and the measure of punishment, in cases not coming directly under the general laws, were not dependent on the ordinances, but fixed by the...