The Scrivener Opinions That Made a Difference
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Pages | 60 |
By Scott Moise
Legal writing takes many forms, including pleadings, motions, briefs, letters, and e-mails. At the top of the legal writing chain are the written opinions from our judges. Trying to winnow down the multitude of significant cases in South Carolina jurisprudence to a list of 10 is an impossible task. There is no chaff in this wheat field of opinions. In coming up with these cases, I have talked with justices, judges, and leading lawyers across the state, and these are the cases that were mentioned most often. This column covers some of these important cases, and others will be covered in the next issue.
The case of the charming "farmer": Prior bad acts
State v. Lyle, 125 S.C. 406, 118 S.E. 803 (1923).
Lyle is a seminal case in South Carolina evidence law that introduced the rule of admissibility of prior bad acts. This opinion was authored by Justice John Hardin Marion, a native of Chester who served as S.C. representative and senator until 1922 when he was elected to the S.C. Supreme Court, where he served for five years.
This case addressed a situation in which the defendant was accused of passing fraudulent checks, with the State seeking to admit evidence that the defendant passed other bad checks under similar circumstances. The facts are as follows: In 1923, a young man named Milton A. Lyle-who was alleged to have travelled from town to town dressed like "a good country farmer" and charmed several bank tellers into giving him money under false pretenses-was convicted of uttering a forged check. His M.O. was to approach the teller and give a false name and a check from a local citizen and ask to open an account and withdraw a certain amount of money from it. The tellers fell for this ruse repeatedly. In one instance at a bank in Aiken, the swindled teller began his own investigation and tracked down Lyle at a hotel in Augusta, Georgia and positively identified Lyle to the police as the perpetrator.
At trial the State introduced evidence, over the defendant's objection, to prove that Mr. Lyle was the same man who issued the forged check, through testimony of five tellers (two in Aiken and three in Georgia). The tellers identified Mr. Lyle as having passed fraudulent checks in their banks and provided bank documents containing signatures from the man who had defrauded their banks. The State also introduced Mr. Lyle's signature from the hotel register in Augusta and his signature on a card written after his arrest. Then, over objection, the State introduced testimony from three experts who testified that the handwriting on the bank forgery documents and that of Mr. Lyle were from the same person.
The court addressed the issue of whether the testimony of the five tellers and the writings they identified were prejudicially erroneous because they tended to prove the defendant committed other distinct crimes similar to the crime in the indictment. The court first noted the long-standing English rule that evidence of the accused's other crimes may not be introduced into evidence "merely to raise an inference or to corroborate the prosecution's theory of the defendant's...
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