Lawrence v. Commonwealth

• Decision Date: 25 February 1886
• Citation: 81 Va. 484
• Parties: LAWRENCE v. THE COMMONWEALTH.
• Court: Virginia Supreme Court

81 Va. 484

LAWRENCE v. THE COMMONWEALTH.

Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia.

February 25, 1886

Argued at Wytheville and decided at Richmond.

Error to judgment of circuit judge of Wythe county, denying writ of error and supersedeas to judgment of county court of said county, rendered 22d July, 1885, against Gus Lawrence who had been found guilty by the jury, and his term of imprisonment in the penitentiary fixed at four years, on an indictment for feloniously breaking and entering a certain bar room, the property of E. C. Deuel, not adjoining to or occupied with the dwelling-house of said E. C. Deuel, with intent to steal, & c. To this judgment a writ of error and supersedeas was obtained by said Lawrence.

W H. Bolling, for the plaintiff in error.

Attorney-General R. A. Ayers, for the Commonwealth.

OPINION

HINTON J.

There is nothing in the objection to the indictment. It charges the statutory offence of house-breaking in the usual form and with legal precision; and as there is nothing in the statute which requires it, I can perceive no good reason why the indictment should in terms negative the idea that the bar room, which was broken into and entered, adjoined any dwelling-house except that of the prosecutor's. The motion to quash was, therefore, properly overruled.

The objection next urged is that the court erred in refusing the request of the prisoner to put colored men on the venire and list furnished the sheriff by the court. It is equally untenable with the one we have just considered. The prisoner was entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and not to a trial by a jury of any particular color or complexion. Albert Mitchell's Case, 33 Gratt. 869; Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. R. 338.

The third assignment of error is that the court erred in its refusal to quash the venire, because it was shown that one of the veniremen lived within the corporate limits of the town of Wytheville, and several others but a few miles without the town. Of course the object of the law is to have a jury obtained who reside in places remote from the place where the act is charged to have been committed. But, as this court said in Craft's Case, 24 Gratt. 615: " The word ‘ remote,’ as used in the statute, is a relative term. What would be remote from the vicinage in a small town like Danville would be near the vicinage in the country, in a sparsely settled county. In a town of four thousand inhabitants...