State v. Stephenson

• Decision Date: 07 May 1904
• Docket Number: 13,800
• Citation: 69 Kan. 405,76 P. 905
• Parties: THE STATE OF KANSAS v. JONATHAN G. STEPHENSON
• Court: Kansas Supreme Court

76 P. 905

69 Kan. 405

THE STATE OF KANSAS v. JONATHAN G. STEPHENSON

No. 13,800

Supreme Court of Kansas

May 7, 1904

Decided January, 1904.

Appeal from Saline district court; R. R. REES, judge.

Judgment affirmed.

SYLLABUS

SYLLABUS BY THE COURT.

1. EVIDENCE -- Books of Accounts. Where a book of accounts is made up from orders for goods or other temporary memoranda and constitutes the first complete and permanent record of the business, it is admissible in evidence, when verified by the oath of the person making the entries that they are correct and were made at or near the times of the transactions.

2. EVIDENCE -- Name of Book Immaterial -- Bookkeeper Need Not Make Sales. The fact that such entries are recorded in a book called a "ledger" does not make them other than original, nor is it necessary that the bookkeeper should have made the sales or billed out the goods sold, to make the entries admissible in evidence.

3. EVIDENCE -- Proper Report of Sales to Bookkeeper. If the sales made be regularly reported to the bookkeeper, and from such reports, or from orders or other temporary memoranda of the salesmen, the entries be correctly and contemporaneously made by him, they may be received in evidence, when duly verified by him.

4. CONSTITUTIONAL LAW -- Indeterminate-sentence Act Upheld. The act providing for the imposition of indeterminate sentences on persons convicted of certain felonies, and authorizing their release, is not unconstitutional because of an infringement upon the judicial power of the courts or the pardoning power of the governor.

5. CRIMINAL PROCEDURE -- Effect of Motion in Arrest of Judgment. The allowance of a motion in arrest of judgment does not operate as an acquittal of the charge made it only places the defendant in the situation in which he was before the prosecution was begun.

6. FALSE PRETENSES -- Case Followed. The case of In re Stephenson, 67 Kan. 556, 73 P. 62, approved and followed.

David Ritchie, and R. D. Armstrong, for appellant.

C. C. Coleman, attorney-general, and C. W. Burch, county attorney, for The State; T. L. Bond, of counsel.

JOHNSTON C. J. All the Justices concurring.

OPINION

JOHNSTON, C. J.:

In an information containing six counts J. G. Stephenson was charged with obtaining goods from the H. D. Lee Mercantile Company by means of false pretenses. On the trial he was found guilty of five of the charges, but a motion in arrest of judgment was sustained as to the finding on four of the counts. Upon the remaining count judgment was rendered, sentencing him to imprisonment at hard labor in the state penitentiary, without fixing the limit or duration of the same. Complaint is made here of the character of the proof offered by the state. In was charged that, to obtain the goods and the credit, appellant made false representations of the amount of his indebtedness. To sustain this averment, and to show that he owed a much larger sum than he represented, the account-books of several of the wholesale houses from which he had obtained credits were received in evidence, first having been authenticated by the oaths of the bookkeepers who made the entries. The verified accounts received were entered on what are called "ledgers," and the contention is that these were not books of original entries.

The evidence discloses that modern wholesale houses have adopted modern methods of bookkeeping, in which the day-book and journal once in common use have no place in the system. The order from a customer comes in, and when approved by a credit man is passed to shipping- and bill-clerks, who select and assemble the goods ordered from different departments of the house and check them out, and then the order, initialed or marked by those through whose hands it has passed, is handed to the bookkeeper, who formally enters the items in a book designated a "ledger." This book is the first complete and permanent record of the charges and credits in the dealings had between the house and the customer. It appears that in some instances, for safety and convenience, an impression of the order is taken in a book, but it is only a copy of the order itself and cannot be regarded as a book of original entries. All that precedes the entries in the so-called "ledger" are mere temporary memoranda which are turned in to the bookkeeper, who makes the first and only formal entries of the transactions between the parties. They are made about the times of the transactions and in the regular course of business. This book is the only permanent record of the dealings of the parties from which the status of a customer's account can be ascertained.

The purpose of the inquiry at the trial was to learn the extent of appellant's indebtedness, and that could not be learned from the orders, but would be shown by the book of accounts wherein was entered, contemporaneously with each...