Martin
v. State
31
Ala.App. 334, 17 So.2d 427.
Dressler,
p. 112
Facts:
Martin was
arrested at home and taken onto the highway, where he showed signs of being
drunk. He was convicted of being drunk
on a public highway and he appealed.
Issue:
Does the
accused have to go onto a public highway voluntarily to be convicted of being
drunk on a public highway?
Rule:
You cannot
be convicted of being drunk on a public highway if you were forcibly taken to
that place by a police officer.
Analysis: The case is pretty
clear-cut. Even though the particular statute
cited doesn’t explicitly require a voluntary act, the court says that basically
a voluntary act is part of the nature of any crime, and thus this
particular conviction was in error.
Conclusion:
The
conviction was reversed and Martin was found not guilty.
Notes
and Questions
1. We don’t
punish people for their thoughts any longer, but should we? It’s argued that it’s impossible to really
know what people are thinking. It is
also suggested that we require an act as well as a thought because we want to
make sure the person cannot be deterred and because we want to prevent multiple
prosecutions. It’s suggested that we
might want to arrest someone who freely confessed to intending to kill the
President. If we did this, however, no
one would confess their intention, and thus our opportunity to prevent the act
would be taken away. If I was a retributivist, I might be skeptical
about whether mere thoughts earn society’s condemnation, and thus whether such
thoughts are punishable. If I were, more
specifically, an advocate of victim vindication, I might be of two minds on the
matter: on one hand, I would figure that since no act had transpired, no “false
moral statement” had been made that was in need of correction. On the other hand, I might believe that given
the chance, we ought to correct false moral thoughts in a person’s mind before
they are expressed in action.
2. Barring
liability for purely involuntary conduct seems to be a strongly utilitarian idea. If an act cannot be deterred, there need not
be punishment for that act. We clearly
cannot deter involuntary actions. Thus,
we should not punish involuntary actions.
3. Let me take a
stab at a definition of a voluntary act: a voluntary act is a bodily motion
accompanied by a mental state which is reflective of the intent to perform the
motion. Well, we’ll see how that holds
up.