State v. Washington
| Decision Date | 27 June 1908 |
| Citation | 61 S.E. 896,80 S.C. 376 |
| Parties | STATE v. WASHINGTON. |
| Court | South Carolina Supreme Court |
Appeal from General Sessions Circuit Court of Greenwood County James Aldrich, Judge.
Dennis Washington was convicted of obstructing a neighborhood road and he appeals. Affirmed.
Exceptions referred to in the opinion were as follows: That his honor erred:
1. In charging the jury as follows: "A neighborhood road is one of those which leads from one public place to another for instance to a church or mill or to a public highway, or connects two public highways." The errors in said charge being as follows: (a) It makes any road to a public highway a neighborhood road, even if it starts from his own house, and goes entirely through his own land to a public highway; (b) that it defines a road to a mill as a neighborhood road whereas, when a man builds a mill on his own land, he impliedly invites people to come to it to have their work done, and therefore they travel over his land by his permission, which he may revoke whenever he wishes, and such permission is revoked by moving or discontinuing the mill. This error was especially harmful and prejudicial to the defendant, because the jury were thereby led to think that every road to a mill was necessarily a neighborhood road, and all the evidence in the case showed that the road was opened by Mr. Vance through his own land for the convenience of the people who might want to go to his mill (c) that the legal and proper definition of a neighborhood road is: A road from one public place to another or from one public highway to another which is used by the general public, and which the general public has acquired a prescriptive right so to use by continuous and adverse use of the same for 20 years or more; (d) that the said charge confounds all distinctions of public roads and private rights of way, and allows a jury to find that any traveled way is a public road.
2. In charging the jury as follows: "If a neighborhood road leads from one place to another, as I have stated to you, for instance, to a mill or highway, and the neighbors use that road there continuously, adversely, for twenty years, that use of the road amounts to an estopment," etc., the errors in said charge being as follows: (a) A road to a mill cannot be a neighborhood road; (b) the use of a road to a mill can only be permissive until it is shown that the owner of the mill has revoked that permission, and that, notwithstanding such revocation, the people have continued to use such road, adversely and against the will of the owner of the land, for 20 years or more after such revocation of permission.
3. In reading in his charge to the jury the statute against obstructing public highways, the errors in such charge being as follows: (a) That the indictment was not for obstructing a "public highway," but for obstructing a "private path" or "neighborhood road," and hence reading the said statute could only confuse and mislead the jury, to the injury of the defendant; (b) that the said statute was entirely irrelevant to the issue here involved, and the reading of the same was manifestly to the prejudice of the defendant.
4. In charging the jury at all on the question of public highways and neighborhood roads, there being no evidence that the road in question belonged to either class, and all the evidence showing that the prosecutor was invoking the aid of the criminal law in the assertion of a purely private right.
5. In refusing defendant's motion for a new trial, because a clear preponderance of the evidence showed that the defendant opened the road through his place after he bought it in 1890 and therefore it had not had time to...
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