Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/552

532 532 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. INTERSTATE CRIME AND INTERSTATE EXTRADITION.^ THE commission of crimes across State boundary lines has given serious trouble, and justice has been cheated, where the State from which the criminal agency emanated has been upon a simple common-law basis. One of the most famous cases is that of State v. Hall, in the Supreme Court of North Carolina. It appeared that the defendants, being in North Carolina, fired a shot which caused the death of a person who was across the boundary line in Tennessee. The defendants were tried for murder in North Carolina, but the Supreme Court of that State held ^ that the courts of Tennessee alone had jurisdiction, because the prisoners " were deemed by the law to have accompanied the deadly missile sent by them across the boundary and to have been constructively present when the fatal wound was actually inflicted." In the opinion a large number of authorities from the different States of the Union are collated, all substantially agreeing that the locus of a crime is the place where the criminal act takes effect It is remarked in the opinion : — "It is true that in Wharton's Criminal Law (§ 288) it is said in a general way that * a concurrent jurisdiction exists in the place of start- ing the offence ; ' but by a reference to the cases cited in support of the proposition it will be readily seen that they have no application to the question under consideration. These and like authorities are where libels are uttered in one State to take effect in another (U. S. v. Worrall, 2 Dal. 388) ; or where, either by common law or by statute, the place of the stroke has concurrent jurisdiction (Green v. State, 66 Ala. 40) ; or where an accessory before the fact in one State to the felony com- mitted in another was held to be indictable in the State where he became accessory (State v. Chapin, 17 Ark. 560); or in certain cases of false pretences or in conspiracies where an overt act is committed at the place of the trial ; or where, by statute, a particular * section ' of an offence committed in one jurisdiction is there made indictable, as for instance, 1 An address delivered by Mr. Larremore before the New York State Bar Associa- tion on January 17, 1899. — Ed. a 114 N. C. 909.