State v. Shinn

The defendant excepts to and assigns as error the refusal of the trial judge to permit him on cross-examination of the State’s witnesses, to show that others who lived in the immediate vicinity of the defendant’s home were known to deal in liquor. It is argued that since the State did not prove that the liquor found outside of the defendant’s home or any part thereof was on his premises, the excluded evidence “might well point with equal gravity to the defendant’s innocence.”

Evidence which can have no effect except to cast suspicion upon another or to raise a mere conjectural inference that…