State v. Richardson
| Decision Date | 23 June 1942 |
| Citation | 27 A.2d 94 |
| Parties | STATE v. RICHARDSON (two cases). |
| Court | New Hampshire Supreme Court |
Transferred from Superior Court, Rockingham County; Connor, Judge.
Noah Richardson, Jr., was convicted in a municipal court of employing a child in violation of statute prohibiting boys under ten years of age and girls under sixteen years of age from selling magazines on the streets and of continuing the child in such prohibited employment after being notified thereof by an inspector or truant officer and the convictions were affirmed by the superior court and the case was transferred on defendant's exceptions.
Defendant discharged.
Complaints, one for violation of P.L. c. 118, § 39, and one for violation of Ib. § 40. On appeal from municipal court convictions verdicts of guilty were returned by a jury in the Superior Court. Exceptions were taken to the applicability of the statute to the facts shown and to its constitutionality, assuming the applicability. These facts, so far as material, appear in the opinion. Transferred by Connor, J.
Frank R. Kenison, Atty. Gen., Ernest R. D'Amours, Asst. Atty. Gen., and Stephen M. Wheeler, Co. Sol., of Exeter, for the State.
Haydon C. Covington, of Brooklyn, N. Y., Alfred A. Albert, of Boston, Mass., and Frank E. Blackburn, of Dover, for defendant.
The statute (P.L. c. 118, § 21) provides that boys under ten and girls under sixteen shall not "sell or expose or offer for sale newspapers, magazines, periodicals or other merchandise in any street or public place", and no child unless over ten "shall work as a bootblack in any street or public place". By another section of the chapter (§ 39), "Whoever employs any child, and whoever permits or suffers any child under his control as parent, guardian or otherwise, to be employed or to work in violation of any of the foregoing provisions" of the chapter, shall be guilty of a criminal offence. The ensuing section (§ 40) provides for a fine for continuance of employment of a child in violation of any such provisions "after being notified thereof by an inspector or truant officer".
In summary of the material facts, the defendant had under his leadership a group of persons, including a boy under ten, engaged in selling or exposing for sale religious magazines on a street in Exeter. He had the full consent of the boy's mother, for him to participate in the exercise, she was one of the group and was near by at the time of the alleged offences. The boy carried a knapsack containing the magazines and having printed on it their names. On the first occasion a price of 5 cents also appeared on the knapsack. In respect to the second offence charged, the defendant permitted the boy to sell the magazines, or at least to expose them for sale, after notice by a State child labor inspector that the permission violated the law. An allowance or commission was paid to all who sold the magazines, but they sold only the magazines devoted to the religion of their sect as Jehovah's Witnesses, and their sales were induced by motive to serve that cause. The publisher of the magazines was a religious organization, using all of its available funds in furtherance of its religious purposes, and any "profit motive" in their sale by members of the sect was negligible. All members regard themselves as ordained ministers of God and consider the sale of the magazines to be a religious service as a form of preaching and spreading their strange and generally unacceptable doctrines and tenets.
The cited statutory provisions were first enacted in 1911 (Laws 1911, c. 162) as sections of a child labor law covering the entire field of the subject. The law was an act of social legislation in regulation of the employment of minors under varying ages according to the nature of the employment, educational sufficiencies and sex. The section prohibiting boys and girls below certain ages from selling or working as bootblacks in public places is under a special heading of the chapter having the title of "Prohibited Employment". The incorporation of the law in the revision and codification of the school laws (Laws 1921, c. 85, Pt. III (b) made no changes affecting its provisions here considered. The employment of children is related in many respects to their education, and the whole subject of child labor was thought by the legislature to be better dealt with and treated in connection with education, while retaining intact and unweakened the purpose to prevent the abuse of young children in their use as an economic asset.
It is thought that the activity in which the boy under the defendant's leadership was engaged is not within the tenor and spirit of the prohibition of sales in public places. His service was not fairly to be classified as a business enterprise or as work, in the ordinary sense of words. To use a common expression, he was not exploited...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Prince v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts
...in the prohibited transactions. The state court has construed these statutes to cover the activities here involved, cf. State v. Richardson, 92 N.H. 178, 27 A.2d 94, thereby imposing an indirect restraint through the parents and guardians on the free exercise by minors of their religious be......
-
Marcotte v. Timberlane/Hampstead Sch. Dist.
...in force may be applicable to new conditions, it may not be amended or amplified by the courts to meet them. State v. Richardson , 92 N.H. 178, 180–81, 27 A.2d 94, 97 (1942) (citations omitted). Since 1971, we have continued to construe RSA 556:12 as providing damages for "the losses sustai......
-
Watchtower Bible and Tract Soc. of New York, Inc. v. Lewisohn
...199 So. 129; Commonwealth v. Akmakjian, 316 Mass. 97, 55 N.E.2d 6; Commonwealth v. Anderson, 308 Mass. 370, 32 N.E.2d 684; State v. Richardson, 92 N.H. 178, 27 A.2d 94; City of Cincinnati v. Mosier, 61 Ohio App. 81, 22 N.E.2d 418; City of Darlington v. Thompson, 234 S.C. 89, 106 S.E.2d 918;......
-
Commonwealth v. Prince
...intended to apply to the activities of ‘Jehovah's Witnesses.’ Perhaps of these cases the one nearest to the present case is State v. Richardson, N.H.1942, 27 A.2d 94. But we cannot regard any of them as decisive of the true construction of our own statutes. We are of opinion that these stat......