65 Mo. 443 | Mo. | 1877
Defendant was indicted at the November term, 1876, of the criminal court of Jackson county for grand larceny. At a subsequent term of said court he was tried and convicted. Motions for new trial and in arrest of judgment having been filed and overruled, he brings his case here by appeal. The counsel for defendant insists that the court erred in giving the second instruction on the part of the State to the effect that the “ possession of property proven to have been recently stolen, is presumptive evidence of the guilt of the party in possession, unless such possession is satisfactorily explained or accounted for.” While the instruction is open to verbal criticism, and the principle announced in it might have been expressed in a form more hypothetical, yet, when it is considered in connection with the first instruction given, the firát given for defendant, and the one given by the court of its own motion, we think the law applicable to the case was fairly given, and that the possession referred to by the
If the conviction in this case rested alone on the simple fact of the ■ possession by defendant of the watch stolen, two añd a half months after it was stolen, we might hesitate to affirm the judgment in view of the proof made as to defendant’s character. But it does not so rest, for defendant in accounting for his possession of the watch, claimed that it had been givén to him by his father in Ohio, in August preceding the September in which it was stolen, and also denied that there was any chain belonging to the watch other than the one attached to it when he was arrested, when upon an examination of defendant’s trunk the chain attached to the watch when it was stolen, was
Aeeirmed.