People v. Boljat

[646]

NOURSE, P. J.

The defendant was charged with a violation of section 286 of the Penal Code in having committed the infamous crime against nature “by then and there having carnal knowledge with the body of an animal, towit: a goat.” He was tried with a jury, and from the judgment of guilty on the verdict and from the order denying a new trial he brings this appeal.

The facts need not be stated in full. The arresting officer, who witnessed the entire transaction, testified' fully as to the commission of the offense as well as to the defendant’s resistance of arrest, his assault upon the officer, his flight from the scene of the crime, and subsequent arrest. The defendant made qualified denials of the essential facts in the state’s ease, but, with the incriminating admissions found in his testimony, he presents an extremely weak case on the evidence. There can be no doubt that the evidence is legally sufficient to sustain the verdict, and we do not understand that the defendant attacks the verdict on that ground. His charge that the testimony of the state’s chief witness was a “multiplication of contradictions, evasions and discrepancies” goes to the credibility of the witness, a matter which was for the jury to decide. There is nothing in the testimony of the witness which would justify this court in holding that it was inherently improbable, false, or incredible.

The appellant argues that he has been deprived of his liberties because the statute does not define the infamous crime against nature with sufficient clearness to have enabled him to know the nature of the offense. Since the days of Blackstone the ancient crime called sodomy has been referred to as the “infamous crime against nature committed with either man or beast.” In

People

v. Williams, 59 Cal. 397, decided in 1881, our Supreme Court said that every person of ordinary intelligence knew what this crime was. There is here no ease of uncertainty in the description of the offense as would support a claim that any of appellant’s constitutional rights were invaded. The objection that a penal statute is void because it fails to define the offense with sufficient clearness, presupposes that, because of the lack of definition, a party might commit the offense not knowing that his act was one included in the statute. Here the appellant rested his defense on a denial of the commission of the act;