253 Pa. 271 | Pa. | 1916
Opinion by
John E. Shields was elected sheriff of Westmoreland County at the November election of 1907, and on the first Monday of January, 1908, assumed the duties of his of
By Section 7, Article II, of the Constitution, it is declared that “No person hereafter convicted of embezzlement of public moneys, bribery, perjury or other infamous crime, shall be eligible to the general assembly, or capable of holding any office of trust or profit in this Commonwealth.” When Shields was sentenced, May 11,1912, on the indictments charging him with embezzlement and perjury, he then became convicted of those offenses. The returns of guilty by the jury did not convict him in the legal sense of that term, but judgments on the verdicts did: Commonwealth v. Minnich, 250 Pa. 363; Commonwealth v. Vitale, 250 Pa. 548. He thus came under the ban of the Constitution, and, during the period for which he is claiming salary, he was incapable of holding any office of trust or profit in this Commonwealth; but it is contended by his counsel on this appeal that, because he had not been removed from his office by due proceedings at law, he is entitled to salary as county commissioner during the seven months he was outside of the county, serving time as a convict in one of the penitentiaries of the State. It requires the full measure of judicial patience to give consideration to this proposition, in support of which nothing is to be found in the cases cited in the appellant’s brief. The question in the case is not the right to claim the salary of an office by one who holds title to it de jure, but was prohibited from discharging his duties through no fault of his own. The claim of the appellant is for the salary of a public office during a period when, by his own misconduct, he had rendered himself, under the supreme law of the State, incapable of holding it. He was, during that period, an
Judgment affirmed.