People v. Baldwin

Van Fleet, J. Defendant was charged with rape, committed upon a minor under the age of consent. He was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape, and appeals from the judgment and an order denying him a new trial.

1. The prosecuting witness was a young girl between eight and nine. years of age; her story as to the circumstances of the offense was, briefly, that in returning from school in the country district where she lived, in company with a little brother and another child companion, she took a short cut through defendant’s premises; that the defendant, who was in his milkhouse at the time, stopped her, and induced her to go into the building by giving her some pretty shells, and there committed the act while she “was standing up .... standing in the middle of the floor,” and the defendant was “ kneeling down.”

The defendant, a married man, denied positively committing the act charged, or any other improper act toward the child; his statement was, that he was standing at the well when the little girl came past, crying as if in pain or distress; that he spoke kindly to her and gave her a drink of water and some shells that were [248]there, when she immediately passed on toward her home; that he did not put his hands upon her in any way.

In support of his defense, the defendant called Dr. Ball, a physician, and was proceeding to show by the witness that it was physically impossible for a man to commit the act complained of, or produce the conditions found on, the person of the child, in the manner and under the circumstances described by her. This evidence was excluded by the court, as irrelevant and immaterial. We think the evidence was both relevant and material, and its exclusion error. The respondent, in fact, has made no effort in its brief to sustain the propriety of the ruling. Such evidence, if believed, would certainly have had a logical tendency, not only to refute the testimony of the girl in a most material feature, but to sustain that of the defendant, and support the theory of the latter—that the condition in which the child’s person was found had been produced by some other means than that claimed by her, or at least by another agency than that of the defendant.

Nor was the error rendered harmless by the fact that the defendant was convicted only of the lesser offense of an assault with intent to commit the act, since, had the evidence been admitted, it might well have satisfied the jury that the girl had willfully misstated the circumstances of the alleged act—a result which would have had a legitimate tendency to discredit her entire statement, and thus possibly have given rise in the minds of the jury to a reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt of any offense.