People v. Lake

• Decision Date: 05 June 1888
• Citation: 17 N.E. 146,110 N.Y. 61
• Parties: PEOPLE v. LAKE.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

110 N.Y. 61

17 N.E. 146

PEOPLE

v.LAKE.¹

Court of Appeals of New York.

June 5, 1888.

Appeal from general term, supreme court, second department.

G. Arnold Moses, for appellant.

Geo. Gallagher, for respondent.

FINCH, J.

The prisoner was convicted of incest. To linger over the facts, or repeat the details of the proof, would peril the calmness and cleanness which belong to a judicial record, and we should therefore touch the disgraceful history only at points where necessity compels. The evidence was claimed to be insufficient, but it fairly established the prisoner's guilt, and fully justified the verdict of the jury. If some of it was open to objection, at least no objection was made, and the inference of the defendant's guilt was an easy deduction from the proof. The principal ground of defense asserted is that the victim of his lust, although his own daughter, was illegitimate, and so, whatever his depravity, it was not the crime of incest. He seduced that daughter's mother; abandoned her and the child for some years; then, returning, took the daughter, just grown into womanhood, for his book-keeper, as he said; seduced her in turn; and now pleads her illegitimate birth, the disgrace which she inherited from her cradle, and inherited from him, as a defense to the charge of which he stands convicted. The law draws no such distinction. If it did, we should be ashamed of it, for the offense, although committed with a daughter born out of wedlock, is not by that fact mitigated or condoned. She stood related to him by consanguinity within the forbidden degrees. That she had no inheritable blood for the purposes of descent and distribution does not alter the actual and natural relation. Kent says, while speaking of the general legislation relative to bastards: ‘This relaxation in the laws of so many of the states of the severity of the common law rests upon the principle that the relation of parent and child, which exists in this unhappy case in all its native and binding force, ought to produce the ordinary legal consequences of that consanguinity.’ 2 Kent, Comm. *213. It was early held to be unlawful for a bastard to marry within the Levitical degrees, ( Hains v. Jeffell, 1 Ld. Raym. 68;) a doctrine which of necessity recognized relationship and consanguinity. But our statutes leave no room for any reasonable doubt. The Penal Code enacts (section 302) that ‘persons being within the degrees of consanguinity within which marriages are declared by law to be incestuous and void, who shall intermarry with each other, or who shall commit adultery or fornication with each other, shall, upon conviction, be punished,’ etc. This enactment is taken from the Revised Statutes, (part 4, c. 1, tit. 5, art. 2, § 12,) and its reference is to the provision as to...