Green v. State
| Decision Date | 03 March 1890 |
| Citation | 7 So. 326,67 Miss. 356 |
| Court | Mississippi Supreme Court |
| Parties | BEN GREEN v. THE STATE |
FROM the circuit court of Copiah county, HON. J. B. CHRISMAN Judge.
The appellant has been convicted of assault with intent to commit rape. The prosecutrix testified that she was riding in the daytime alone and on horse-back along the public road, about two miles from the town of Hazlehurst, when reaching a place where the public road crosses the railroad, she noticed a negro man standing on the crossing. Hearing a train approaching, she stopped and turned the horse's head towards the man, thinking, as she says, that he could assist her if the train frightened her horse. After riding two or three hundred yards beyond the crossing, she noticed that the man was following her on foot, evidently having traveled briskly, and she had ridden but little further when he came hurriedly up behind her and caught her riding-skirt. She immediately uttered an outcry and urged on her horse, and the man, without having spoken, fled in another direction. The prosecutrix on the trial identified the defendant. This was all the evidence. The jury convicted the accused. He moved for a new trial because of the insufficiency of the evidence and the motion being overruled, appeals.
Judgment reversed.
Ramsey & Willing, and H. B. Mayes, for appellant.
The evidence must be sufficient to satisfy the jury beyond a reasonable doubt, not only that the prisoner intended to gratify his passion on the prosecutrix, but that he so intended at all events and notwithstanding resistance. State v. Massey, 86 N.C. 658; Roscoe's Cr. Ev 811; Joice v. The State, 53 Ga. 50. Under the evidence, the intent might just as well have been to rob or murder. Unless violent presumptions be drawn from the race instinct of the African, the verdict is wholly unsupported by the evidence.
T. M. Miller, attorney-general, for the state.
The evidence is insufficient to support the verdict of the jury. We may conjecture the purpose of the defendant to have been to commit a rape, but, on the facts disclosed, it is conjecture only, and not an inference reasonably drawn from the evidence. The probabilities may be greater that a rape was intended rather than robbery or murder, but mere probability of guilt of a particular crime, and that, too, springing more from instinct than from proved facts, cannot support a verdict of guilty.
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