Gillman v. State

Supreme Court of Alabama

Gillman v. State

51 So. 722, 165 Ala. 135, 1910 Ala. LEXIS 73

CourtSupreme Court of Alabama

DecidedFebruary 3, 1910

StatusPublished

Cited by42 cases

This text of 51 So. 722 (Gillman v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Alabama primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook

Gillman v. State, 51 So. 722, 165 Ala. 135, 1910 Ala. LEXIS 73 (Ala. 1910).

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Opinion

SAYRE, J.

— On her cross-examintion as a witness in her own behalf the defendant was required to answer whether she had been convicted of an assault and battery in the mayor’s court, by which, we take it, was meant that she had been convicted of the violation of an ordinance of the city of Bessemer punishing assault and battery. There are two reasons why this was error:

1. Section 4008 of the Code, relating to the competency and credibility of witnesses as affected by conviction for crime, contemplates only convictions for violations of the state laws, and not conviction's for violations of municipal ordinances. — Cheatham v. State, 59 Ala. 40.

2. A mere assault and battery does not involve moral turpitude. Moral turpitude signifies an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, depravity. Assaults and batteries are frequently the result of transient ebullitions of passion, to which a high order of men are liable, and do not necessarily involve any inherent element of moral turpitnre.

Reversed and remanded.

Anderson, McClellan, and Mayfield, JJ., concur.

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