Leslie v. State

• Decision Date: 26 March 1895
• Docket Number: 3.
• Citation: 17 So. 559,35 Fla. 184
• Parties: LESLIE v. STATE.
• Court: Florida Supreme Court

17 So. 559

35 Fla. 184

LESLIE v. STATE.

No. 3.

Florida Supreme Court

March 26, 1895

Error to circuit court, St. Johns county; R. M. Call, Judge.

John Leslie, alias Charles Harrison, alias Charles Pearce, was convicted of larceny, and brings error. Affirmed.

Syllabus by the Court

SYLLABUS

1. Where a party, while under arrest, of his own motion calls another party, from whose hotel certain jewelry has recently been stolen, privately to one side, and there voluntarily and without inducement or threat, proposes to give up the jewelry recently stolen from such party's hotel upon condition that he is released, such proposition is such a voluntarily made confession, as to both the possession of the stolen goods and as to knowledge that such goods had been stolen, as to become pertinently admissible in a subsequent trial of such prisoner for the larceny of such jewelry.

2. Where the proof in a trial for larceny showed that the property was stolen from 'Lynn's Hotel, in the city of St. Augustine,' it is sufficient to establish the venue of the crime as being in St. Johns county, the city of St. Augustine being the county seat of that county.

COUNSEL F. W. Pope and M. C. Jordan, for plaintiff in error.

William B. Lamar, Atty. Gen., for the State.

OPINION

TAYLOR J.

The plaintiff in error was indicted, tried, and convicted at the fall term, 1894, of the circuit court for St. Johns county of the crime of larceny of the property of the Augusta Scheer exceeding $100 in value, and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in the state penitentiary, which judgment he seeks to reverse by writ of error.

We have recently, at the present term, disposed of another case against the same defendant (17 So. 555), wherein he was tried and convicted in the same court of the crime of entering a certain building or office, the property of one L. Alexander with intent to commit a misdemeanor, to wit, with intent to commit larceny of property less in value than $100. In that case the conviction sustained was had substantially upon the same testimony adduced in the present case, the points of law raised and decided upon the assignments of error therein were identically the same as are presented in this case, and what is said and decided upon the various questions in that case are fully decisive of the same questions presented in this. It is therefore unnecessary for us to notice further any of the assignments of error in this case, with two exceptions not presented in the other case.

The property stolen in this case was shown to have consisted of several articles of diamond jewelry belonging to Miss Augusta Scheer, and were shown to have been stolen out of her trunk in a room of an hotel in St. Augustine occupied by her, which hotel was kept by Joseph Lynn, and was known as 'Lynn's Hotel.' It was further shown that the defendant, within a day or two after the jewelry was...