Placing torch on bottom of block crashes game

When you attempt to place a torch on the bottom of a block, rather than going to the side of an adjacent block, it causes the game to crash with the following error message in the crash log: "---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
// Hi. I'm Minecraft, and I'm a crashaholic.

Time: 4/12/17 9:24 PM
Description: Unexpected error

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot set property avz

{name=facing, clazz=class ei, values=[up, north, south, west, east]}

to down on block minecraft:torch, it is not an allowed value"