Talkington v. State
| Decision Date | 12 March 1906 |
| Court | Mississippi Supreme Court |
| Parties | EDWARD TALKINGTON v. STATE OF MISSISSIPPI |
November 1905
FROM the circuit court of Tate county, HON. JAMES B. BOOTHE Judge.
Talkington the appellant, a white boy, seventeen years of age, was indicted and tried for and convicted of an assault and battery in and upon the person of one Centennial Timmons, a negro girl, ten years of age, with intent to ravish and carnally know the said Centennial, and appealed to the supreme court. The principal assignment of error was predicated of the introduction, over defendant's objection, of the hearsay testimony mentioned in the opinion of the court, the facts in respect to which are there stated.
Reversed and remanded.
J. F Dean, and M. H. Thompson, for appellant.
Error was committed by the court below in permitting Williams, a witness for the state, to detail a conversation he had with Henry Timmons, the father of Centennial Timmons, in the absence of the defendant, about prosecuting the defendant.
First--It was hearsay of the rankest kind; it was permitting one state witness to testify what another state witness, present and testifying in court, had told him in the absence of the accused.
Second--Not only was it error to permit Williams to tell what Timmons had said, but Timmons himself could not testify properly as to what he had told Williams, nor his own desires as to proscuting the defendant. Still, he was permitted to do so. It could shed no light on the question in issue whether or not Edward Talkington had raped or attempted to rape the girl, and it was not introduced for that purpose. It was introduced for the purpose of creating a prejudice against the defendant and to bolster up the state's own witness by showing that, being a negro, he was afraid to prosecute a white boy, and to show that the most influential men of Arkabutla, and not the negro, were prosecuting the case. It was injecting a race question into the trial of the case that had no business there, and which worked with fatal effect on the trial jury.
R. V. Fletcher, assistant attorney-general, for appellee.
Touching the testimony of Williams in regard to what the father of the child said about not wanting to prosecute the defendant, we beg to say that the purpose of introducing this testimony was to show that the witness was not a willing witness, animated by an overwhelming desire to convict, but that his evidence was given because he was brought before the jury by the process of the...
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