Justice--

"I conceive it to be the law, that in the case of an indictment, if
there be ONE GOOD COUNT in an indictment upon which the defendants have
been declared guilty by proper findings on the record, and a judgment
given for the crown, imposing a sentence authorized by law to be awarded
in respect of the particular offence, that such judgment cannot be
reversed by a writ of error, by reason of one or more of the counts in
the indictment being bad in point of law."

The main argument of the traversers' counsel was thus disposed of--

"It was urged at your lordships' bar, that all the instances which have
been brought forward in support of the proposition, that one good count
will support a general judgment upon an indictment in which there are
also bad counts, are cases in which there was a motion in _arrest of
judgment_, not cases where a _writ of error_ has been brought. This may
be true; for so far as can be ascertained, there is no single instance
in which a writ of error has been ever brought to reverse a judgment
upon an indictment, upon this ground of objection. But the very
circumstance of the refusal by the court to arrest the judgment, where
such arrest has been prayed on the ground of some defective count
appearing on the record, and the assigning by the court as the reason
for such refusal, that there was one good count upon which the judgment
might be entered up, affords the strongest argument, that they thought
the judgment, _when entered up_, was irreversible upon a writ of error.
For such answer could not otherwise have been given; it could have had
no other effect than to mislead the prosecutor, if the court were
sensible at the time, that the judgment, when entered up, might
afterwards be reversed by a court of error."

The grand argument derived from _the language of the judgment_, was thus
encountered:--

"I interpret the words, 'that the defendant _for his offences_
aforesaid, be fined and imprisoned,' in their plain literal sense, to
mean _such offences as are set out in the counts of the indictment which
are free from objection, and of which the defendant is shown by proper
findings on the record to have been guilty_--that is in effect the
offences contained in the fifth and eighth, and all the subsequent
counts. And I see no objection to the word offences, in the plural,
being used, whether the several counts last enumerated do intend several
and distinct offences, or only one offence d