Whitney

Defendant was convicted of statutory rape, the prosecutrix being under the age of consent. She was an adopted child, and had lived with defendant and his wife for six years. She was nearly eighteen when the act of intercourse charged in the information is alleged to have taken place. She testified that immediately after being taken into the home of the Whitney’s she began to sleep in the same bed with the defendant, and that this practice with occasional intermissions was continued during all the years that she lived with them. She further testified that this was agreeable to Mrs. Whitney; in fact, that the latter preferred to sleep alone. She declared also that defendant had improper relations with her at frequent intervals over nearly the whole of this period. She was subjected to a rigid cross-examination covering two hundred and fifty pages of the transcript, but her testimony was unshaken. In fact, as often happens in such protracted cross-examinations, she fortified and strengthened the impression made by her examination in chief. The only point made by appellant in his brief of nearly two hundred pages is that the story is inherently improbable, and, therefore, it should be…