State v. Crumbey
| Decision Date | 06 November 1917 |
| Docket Number | 3379. |
| Citation | 94 S.E. 137,81 W.Va. 287 |
| Parties | STATE v. CRUMBEY. |
| Court | West Virginia Supreme Court |
Submitted October 30, 1917.
Syllabus by the Court.
Railroad transfer, and ferry tickets, not specifying any sums of money payable in transportation, are not writings, papers, or books on which money is due or by which money is secured, within the meaning of sections 15 and 16 of chapter 145 of Code 1913 (secs. 5206, 5207), and, unless the intrinsic value of the paper therein is $20 or more, or the value of the transportation they call for is shown to be $20 or more there can be no conviction of grand larceny, on allegation and proof of theft thereof.
If such papers, when stolen, are not available as means of obtaining transportation, for lack of a stamp, date, countersignature punch hole or otherwise, they have no transportation value and the degree or grade of the larceny thereof is determinable by their value as mere paper, unless they have a value as receipts or vouchers.
In the absence of proof that railroad transportation tickets and coupons taken up by a railway conductor, in payment of fares for transportation, and afterwards stolen, have a money value as receipts or vouchers in the hands of the conductor, or his employer after surrender thereof by him, in settlements of accounts, their value, in the determination of the character of the offense perpetrated in the theft thereof, is the mere value of the paper on which they are printed or written.
General statements or conclusions of witnesses as to the value of such papers, without specification of the use made of them or the character or ground of their value, are not sufficient to sustain a conviction on the theory of the existence of the value so stated.
On the trial of a person charged with the larceny of incomplete and ineffective railroad, transfer, and ferry tickets, it is improper to permit the state to prove methods of alterations thereof by which he or other persons could have rendered them illegitimately and wrongfully available for payment of, or exchange for, transportation.
Error to Circuit Court, Wayne County.
Tom Crumbey was convicted of grand larceny, his motion for new trial was overruled, and he brings error. Reversed and remanded for new trial.
William Lovins and Philip P. Gibson, both of Huntington, for plaintiff in error.
E. T. England, Atty. Gen., and Charles Ritchie, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the State.
The plaintiff in error, by a motion made in due time, attacked the verdict against him, in a trial on an indictment for the larceny of a railroad conductor's train box valued at $1.90, 77 transfer tickets valued at $37.50, 200 ferry tickets valued at $10, and 50 railway passenger tickets valued at $75, the goods and chattels of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company, for lack of proof of such value in the articles taken as suffices to make the offense committed, if any, grand larceny, and for error in the admission of proof that the tickets alleged to have been taken, though practically worthless to the accused in the condition in which they were at the time of the taking, could have been easily and readily made useful to him or other persons, as means of procuring transportation, by slight alterations therein. The court having overruled his motion and sentenced him to imprisonment for a period of five years, he seeks reversal of the judgment and a new trial.
All of the passenger tickets in question had been taken up from passengers on the train by the conductor, and canceled by the punching of holes therein. The transfer tickets and ferry tickets had not been used, and no stamp nor countersignature had to be put on them to make them available for use, but there were printed dates on them, one of which in each case had to be punched out by the conductor issuing them to make them so. Although the passenger tickets had been punched, the conductor was permitted to testify that any person having one of them might render it available for use by writing a notation on it to the effect that it had been punched by mistake, as conductors sometimes do, thereby making them receivable for transportation by the issuing carrier; and that the other tickets could have been wrongfully made effective by punching out dates printed thereon.
The offense charged is a statutory one. At common law, the...
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