184 So. 165 | Miss. | 1938
The City of Pascagoula operates under the code chapter on municipalities, and it has a general ordinance making all misdemeanors, which are such under state statutes, offenses also against the city. Section 2549, Code 1930. Appellee was prosecuted in the city court under an affidavit attempting to charge him with the public display of indecent or obscene words or letters on his automobile, but the affidavit did not set out the words. Having been convicted in the city court, the defendant appealed to the circuit court, where a demurrer to the affidavit was sustained for its failure to set out the words charged to be obscene or indecent. Thereupon the City asked leave to amend the affidavit so that it would charge as follows: *167
"Did wilfully and unlawfully in violation of said ordinance show and have in his possession an obscene writing, the same being painted in yellow letters on the hood of a certain Model T Ford automobile owned by the said Oliver Noland and which Ford was left by the said Oliver Noland in front of the United States Post Office in the said City of Pascagoula, Mississippi, a public place and which obscene writing was in the following words, to-wit: All you ladies that smoke cigarettes throw your butts in here."
The court declined to allow the amendment, dismissed the cause, discharged the defendant, and the City has appealed from that action.
The quoted language is obscene within the interpretation placed upon that term by most of the courts. In Holcombe v. State,
And we think the case comes within the cited statute. It is true that the statute deals primarily, or in the main, with obscene or indecent literature, — with something printed, written, drawn or pictured on paper; but if the words here complained of had been printed or painted on paper and this paper pasted on the automobile, it would have been no more nor less than the equivalent, *168 in substance and in effect, of the same words painted on the car without the use or intervention of paper in so doing.
The amendment being material to the merits of the case, it should have been allowed. City of Pascagoula v. Seymour,
Reversed and remanded.