Commonwealth v. Ashey

The defendants were indicted under G. L. c. 272, § 17, which provides: “ Persons within the degrees of consanguinity within which marriages are prohibited or declared by law to be incestuous and void, who intermarry or have sexual intercourse with each other, shall be punished . . . It was admitted that they went through a ceremony of marriage on December 18, 1922, that they lived together as husband and wife and that they had sexual intercourse. The jury returned a verdict of guilty against both, and answered specially that the relationship of the male defendant to the mother of the female…