People v. Singh

HART, J.

The defendant was convicted in the superior court in and for the county of Yuba of the infamous

[33]

crime against nature (Pen. Code, see. 286), and he appeals from the judgment of conviction and the order denying him a new trial.

The alleged pederastic performance is alleged to have taken place in the city of Marysville, on or about the fourth day of February, 1928. The party upon whom the crime is alleged to have been committed was a boy approaching, if not just past, his majority.

It appears that two police officers while patrolling their “beats” in the neighborhood of Tenth and D Streets in the city above named, at or near the hour of 2 o’clock A. M. of the day, also named above, noticed a Ford coupe parked or standing “in a secluded spot,” on the east side of D Street, near Tenth, and facing or heading in a northerly direction. In that immediate vicinity there were no residences. Conceiving that an automobile parked in so unusual a place in the city at that time of the day was a circumstance of more or less a suspicious character, or at least one justifying an investigation, the officers went to the coupe, and, turning a flashlight into the car, found the defendant awake and “crowded right over” the young man referred to, who was asleep and lying across the seat of the coupe on his left side, with his head partly under the steering wheel. The officers testified that the trousers of the young man were down and below the posterior part of his anatomy, that his union undershirt was open behind, that his coat was turned up and that his buttocks were bare or exposed. The officers awakened the young man and, when they attempted to take him from the car, he resisted and started to fight. They arrested and took the two men to the city jail. Suspecting from appearances that the crime charged in the information had been committed, the officers sent for Dr. P. B. Hoffman, a physician of Marysville, and the doctor, immediately after the arrest of the two men—near the hour of 3 o’clock A. M. —appeared at the jail and subjected the anus of the young man and the private parts of the defendant to a critical examination. He took from the private parts of the defendant some filthy matter, placed it in a tin box and caused it to be subjected to a chemical test by the director of the laboratory at the Rideout Hospital in said city. The following day Dr. Hoffman, assisted by Dr. Sloane, a