Donaldson

Defendant was charged by information filed by the district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco with the crime of obtaining money by false pretenses. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment in the state prison. He now appeals from said judgment and from the order denying his motion for a new trial.

From the record it appears that one Marguerite H. Nesbitt, the prosecutrix, conducted a small grocery store in the outskirts of San Francisco, and that the defendant, having heard that she had recently won twenty thousand dollars in a lottery, conceived a plan to get this money from her. Accordingly, after having by a ruse made her acquaintance, he represented to her that he was the owner of a very valuable mine out of which he had made within the past six months the sum of one hundred thousand dollars; that if she cared to do so he thought he could arrange to let her invest twenty thousand dollars, which amount was needed to complete certain necessary improvements on the mining property, and that if she should do so she would within a short time thereby gain at least one hundred thousand dollars. She was inexperienced, gullible, and guileless; he…