Case ID: ga-app_37/html/0606-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "\n      Luke, J.", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

18573.
    Coleman v. The State.
    Criminal Law, 16 C. J. p. 764, n. 54.
    Decided January 7, 1928.
    Adultery and fornication; from Crisp superior court—Judge Crum. September 30, 1927.
    Charley Coleman was convicted under an indictment which charged him with having committed adultery and fornication with Lessie Boyer. From the evidence for the State it appears that on a Saturday, shortly before midnight when the occupants of the Dawkins home just outside the city limits of Cordele were away, the defendant, a married man, went to that house in a car with Lessie Boyer, an unmarried girl, nineteen years old, and they remained in the house alone until Sunday afternoon about 4 o’clock. A man working during the night and until 7 o’clock the next morning at a coal chute near the Dawkins house and “in plain view of the house” testified that there was no light in' the house when they entered and he did not see any light after they went in. One of the Dawkins family, a boy, who had been told by this man that they were in the house, testified that when he got back there Sunday morning about 7 o’clock the door was fastened on the inside, and that he knocked on it but got no response; that he went back in a car in the afternoon, with others, but did not get into the house until about 4 o’clock. As to what occurred at that time he testified: “I called Mr. Coleman and told him that he would have to get out, and he said, ‘Well.’ He finally opened the door, and when we went in the house Charley Coleman and Lessie Boyer were in there. . . Charlie Coleman was standing up and the girl was sitting on the . . side of the bed. . . There were two beds in that room. One of them had been slept in; that bed was in a pretty bad condition, was torn up and wallowed over, the sheets' rumpled up. . . The girl was dressed when I went in, all but her slippers, which were sitting down by the side of the bed. Coleman was dressed. . . Coleman said he would go if I would take them home, and I took them,—carried her to her home and brought Coleman back here to Cordele. The girl lived on Mr. Wade’s place, about eight or nine miles in the country. . . When I left the house Saturday night the bed on which I found the girl sitting the next afternoon was in good order. . . There were two pillows on that bed, and both of them had been used.” The defendant and the girl had previously been seen together riding and at parties and on other occasions. The defendant, in his statement at the trial, denied that he was at the Dawkins home on the Saturday night mentioned, and said that he got in a car with young Dawkins and the girl Lessie Boyer that night, at the request of Dawkins, and rode with them to Pulaski county, and, at the insistence of Dawkins, went to the Dawkins home with them on Sunday morning, that they all went out in a car in the country on Sunday, and that later Dawkins took the girl home and then brought him home.
   Luke, J.

While the evidence, which is entirely circumstantial, raises a grave suspicion of the defendant’s guilt, it does not exclude every other reasonable hypothesis than that of his guilt; and for this reason alone the judgment overruling his motion for a new trial is reversed.

Judgment reversed.

Broyles, O. J., concurs. Bloodworth, J., dissents.

Strozier & Gower, G. L. Harris, for plaintiff in error, cited:

Long v. State, 5 Ga. App. 176; Mathis v. State, 30 Ga. App. 10; 32 Ga. App. 542; Weems v. State, 84 Ga. 461.

T. Hoyt Davis, solicitor-general, contra.