Bryant v. State

• Decision Date: 07 May 1904
• Citation: 81 S.W. 234
• Parties: BRYANT v. STATE.
• Court: Arkansas Supreme Court

81 S.W. 234

BRYANT v. STATE.

Supreme Court of Arkansas.

May 7, 1904.

Appeal from Circuit Court, Greene County; Allen Hughes, Judge.

J. H. Bryant was convicted of illegally selling liquor, and appeals. Reversed.

M. P. Huddleston, for appellant. George W. Murphy, Atty. Gen., for the State.

RIDDICK, J.

The defendant, J. H. Bryant, was at the September term of the Greene circuit court for 1902 indicted for selling liquor without license. The indictment, which was numbered 35, charged that the offense was committed on the 17th day of June, 1902. At the same term of court another indictment was returned against him, in which he was charged with having sold liquor without license on the 20th day of July, 1902, and this indictment was numbered 36. The only witness for the prosecution in each of these cases was William Kendall. Bryant was tried on indictment No. 35, in which he was charged with selling on the 17th day of June, and was convicted on the testimony of the prosecuting witness William Kendall. When the trial for the second indictment came on, the defendant entered pleas of former conviction and of not guilty. To sustain his plea of former conviction, he took the stand as a witness, and testified that he never had any other transaction with William Kendall than the one investigated in the first trial, and that the offenses charged in the two indictments were the same. He also introduced a copy of the evidence given by William Kendall on the former trial, which showed that the testimony in that case was not limited to an offense committed at any particular time, but covered all transactions of the kind between the witness and the defendant occurring within one year before the indictment. In a similar case Chief Justice Cockrill said that: "The state may preclude the possibility of more than one conviction, even where there have been many sales, by taking a wide range in the proof, putting all the guilty sales in evidence, and relying upon the whole proof for a single conviction. In that case the defendant can be convicted upon the proof of any one of the sales made within a year of the finding of the indictment, and it is the established rule that the former conviction is a bar to a subsequent indictment for any offense of which the defendant might have been convicted upon the testimony under the indictment in the first case." State v. Blahut, 48 Ark. 34, 2 S. W. 190. Now, in this case the evidence shows that the state relied in each case for...