Brown v. State

Robinson, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The accused was indicted under section 1 of Article 26 of the Code, for enticing and persuading Ella Shafer, a girl under the age of eighteen years, from the custody and control of her parents ‘‘ for the purposes of prostitution." The mother, having testified that her daughter was in her seventeenth year, and that she had gone to live witli the accused without her consent, was asked upon cross-examination the following question: “Before your daughter left Hagerstown and went to Mrs. Brown's, did you not know that she was an habitué of a bawdy house in Hagerstown? " There cannot be, it seems to us, any objection to this question. To sustain the indictment, the State was bound to prove that the accused had enticed or persuaded the girl to leave her home or usual place of abode without her mother's consent.

If the girl was in fact an inmate of a bawdy house before she went to live with the accused, and this was known to her mother, such evidence was material upon the question whether the girl left her home by the persuasion of the accused, and without the consent of her mother. In Regina vs. Primelt and Simmonds, 1 Fost. & Fin., 50, on an indictment under the Statute 9 Geo. 4, chap. 31, sec. 90, for unlawfully taking an unmarried girl under the age of sixteen years out of the possession and against the will of the mother, the proof was that the mother permitted her daughter to go to dances at public inns, and permitted her to stay out late at night, with ⁴⁷⁹ out any one to look after her, and that the mother left the door on the latch, or came down to let her in. In summing up, the Chief Justice told the jury if “they thought that the mother had, by her conduct, countenanced her daughter in a lax course of life, by permitting her to go out alone at night, and to dance at public inns, this was not a case that came within the intent of the statute, but was one where what had occurred, though unknown to her, could not be said to have happened against her will.” Without meaning to go so far in this case, it is sufficient fo> say, that the question proposed to the witness on cross-examination was, for the reasons we have stated, a proper question and ought to have been allowed. The prosecutrix herself, having been examined in chief, was asked on cross-examination, “where did you stay the night before you left Hagerstown for Mrs. Brown's house?” with an offer to follow it up by proof as to the character of the