People v. Knight

TYLER, P. J.

Defendant was charged with having committed lewd and lascivious acts upon the body of a female child under the age of fourteen years with the intent of arousing and gratifying the lust and passions and sexual desires of himself and such child, as denounced by section 288 of the Penal Code. He was tried and found guilty.

He had been previously convicted of the same offense but a new trial was granted by the lower court upon the ground that it had permitted the prosecution to introduce evidence of similar offenses committed against other little girls for the purpose of showing the disposition of the defendant to commit crimes of the character with which he is charged. The points here relied upon for a reversal of the judgment of conviction present practically the same question, though the evidence was received in this trial upon a different theory.

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Briefly stated, the facts are as follows: Defendant at the time of the offense charged was about fifty-seven years of age. He is the father of three adult children. He was divorced from his wife and lived alone in a small cottage in the Mission district. According to his own testimony he was very fond of little children, and his chief pleasure in life was to do things to make them happy. In the basement of his cottage he had erected a swing and slide upon which children might play, and he had also accumulated a large number of so-called funny papers for their amusement, in addition to which he maintained a piano in his home upon which he permitted little children to strum. It was his custom to visit a park in the neighborhood and to attract children by distributing his funny papers to them He invited numerous young girls to his home, where he amused them upon the swing and slide. The prosecutrix, a little girl nine years of age, was one of the many children who frequently visited him. At the time the alleged offense was committed she testified that she called on defendant with her little brother; that defendant on that occasion removed his clothing and put on a bathrobe, and then removed her underwear and placed his private parts against hers. For this crime defendant was arrested.

When confronted by the prosecutrix with her charges and those of several other little girls, who had accused him of having placed his hands between their limbs while he was swinging them, and also at times when he was reading funny papers to them, defendant did not deny the charges