Ex Parte Grubbs

• Decision Date: 25 November 1901
• Court: Mississippi Supreme Court
• Parties: EX PARTE JOSEPH GRUBBS

30 So. 708

79 Miss. 358

EX PARTE JOSEPH GRUBBS

Supreme Court of Mississippi

November 25, 1901

October 1901

FROM the judgment of HON. FRANK E. LARKIN, circuit judge, denying relief on habeas corpus.

The opining of the supreme court fully states the facts.

Affirmed.

Cornelius J. Jones, for appellant.

The affidavits upon which the pretended convictions are based are all crude and utterly insufficient to support the pretended convictions, hence the appellant should have been discharged.

Monroe McClurg, attorney-general, contra.

Grubbs' remedy was an appeal to the circuit court.

OPINION

TERRAL, J.

Joseph Grubbs shows in his petition for a writ of habeas corpus tat he has been duly committed to the custody of the convict contractor of Washington county by the sheriff of said county under convictions for crime, before a justice of the peace of said county, of four several and distinct misdemeanors. The petitioner sets out in his complaint the substance of several affidavits of said several misdemeanors upon which he was convicted, and he points out errors and defects in said affidavits which he claims avoid the several convictions. It must be admitted that three of the affidavits upon which Grubbs was convicted are erroneous and defective, and do not properly charge crimes against him, and if objections thereto had been seasonably made they would have been quashed. But it is not competent for Grubbs to attack the proceedings against him in the way here pursued. He should have objected to the affidavits severally before the justice of the peace, and failing of redress there, he should have appealed his cause to the circuit court. A writ of habeas corpus is not a process for taking advantage of such errors and defects. The sufficiency of an affidavit or indictment for crime is a matter of great concern in the administration of public justice, but such sufficiency must be tested in a proper manner in the courts where the prosecutions are had, and the writ of habeas corpus cannot be used as writ of error or an appeal, because the decision of the trial court is conclusive unless reversed on appeal. Any other rule would throw the administration of the criminal law into inextricable confusion.

Judgments of courts are disregarded and held for nothing where the court passing the sentence had no jurisdiction over the subject-matter or over the person sentenced; but where jurisdiction is obtained...