| Summary: | Fore, a free man of colour, and Chesnut, a white woman, were arraigned by the state on charges of unlawfully cohabiting and having a child. Their counsel offered in their defence a marriage licence from the county clerk bearing a date subsequent to the passing of a law prohibiting marriage between white people and free people of colour. The court rejected this testimony and convicted the couple; the defendants' counsel moved for improper rejection of testimony, which was denied, and then moved for arrest of judgment on the grounds that the indictment against them was insufficient in that it did not specify the sexes of the two parties. This being rejected, the couple appealed. The Supreme Court ruled that though the parties' sexes had not been explicitly specified in the indictment, it had used a masculine pronoun to refer to one party and stated that the parties had had a child together, rendering it sufficiently clear that one party was male and the other female. Verdict upheld.
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