81 Va. 484 | Va. | 1886
delivered the opinion of the court.
There is nothing in the objection to the indictment. It charges the statutory offence of house-breaking in the usual form and with legal precision; and as there is nothing in the statute which requires it, I can perceive no good reason why the indictment should in terms negative the idea that the bar room, which was broken into and entered, adjoined any dwelling-house except that of the prosecutor’s. The motion to quash was, therefore, properly overruled.
The objection next urged is that the court erred in refusing the request of the prisoner to put colored men on the venire and list furnished the sheriff by the court. It is equally untenable with the one we have just considered. The prisoner was entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, and not to a trial by a jury of any particular color or complexion. Albert Mitchell’s Case, 33 Gratt. 869; Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. R. 338.
The third assignment' of error is that the court erred in its refusal to quash the venire, because it was shown that one of the veniremen lived within the corporate limits of the town of Wytheville, and several others but a few miles without the town. Of course the object of the law is to have a jury obtained who reside in places remote from the place where the act is charged to have been, committed. But, as this court said in Craft’s Case, 24 Gratt. 615: “ The word ‘ remote,’ as used in
This extract from the opinion of this court in the above cited case sufficiently answers the objection here. In the present case all of the jurors, save one, resided at least two miles beyond the corporate limits; and as to that one, there is nothing in the record to show that he resided near to the scene of the crime. As therefore the venire facias was in proper form and required the sheriff to summon persons of his county residing remote from the place where the offence was alleged to have been committed; and there is nothing in the record to show that any of the jury resided near to the scene of crime; and as. the objection was not made to the single juror, who could alone have been by possibility amenable to the objection, we must hold that this assignment of error was not well taken.
The last assignment of error is to the refusal of the court to
The order of the judge of the circuit court refusing a writ of error is right, and the judgment of the county court of Wythe county must be affirmed.
Judgment affirmed.