State v. . Shelnutt

7 S.E.2d 561, 217 N.C. 274, 1940 N.C. LEXIS 219

• Court: Supreme Court of North Carolina
• Decided: March 20, 1940
• Status: Published

Opinion

Seawell, J.

¥e bave not attempted to set out the evidence in detail, or to call attention to other parts of the State’s evidence which might offer a speculative suggestion of defendant’s guilt. He was tried for forging and uttering the specific checks described in the indictment, and the fact,, if true, that he had forged a multitude of them in wrongfully converting his employer’s funds does not identify the nine checks with which the investigation was concerned as being so forged and uttered, but only induced a speculative, not a probative persuasion that they were forged. Sampson v. Jackson Bros., 203 N. C., 413, 166 S. E., 181; Ivey v. Cotton Oil Co., 199 N. C., 452, 154 S. E., 740; S. v. Vinson, 63 N. C., 335. Persons are not retired from society because they are criminals or because they have committed crimes one or many, but only upon conviction of the specific crime of which they are charged.

It is not necessary to go into the refinements of law relating to the necessity of proving the “corpus delicti¡‘ and whether it may be established by a confession alone. The State, having charged the defendant with forging these specific checks, and the defendant never having made any specific reference to them in any confession, or made any statement from which they might be segregated or identified, his admissions are not available for the necessary purpose of identification. If we consider the checks described in the indictment as present through recordak or photostatic copies, the efforts of the State to produce proof that the signatures to them were forged were unsuccessful.

The evidence, considered in its most favorable light to the State, will not sustain conviction.

The motion for nonsuit should have been allowed, and the judgment overruling the motion is

Reversed.