Allen v. State

Thompson, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. On July 3, 1962, Willard Lee Allen, the appellant, walked into the Central Police Station in Baltimore City and stated that he had killed a woman in a motel on Route 50 in Baltimore County in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 1, 1962. He described the homicide and disposal of the body in considerable detail. At the request of the Maryland authorities the Philadelphia police, the same afternoon, broke open the trunk of a rented Ford automobile parked on Market Street in that city and discovered the decomposed body of a woman, bound and gagged and wrapped in a bedspread.

A subsequent autopsy revealed that the cause of her death was a combination of chloroform, alcohol, gasoline and carbon monoxide inhalation. Since the location of,the motel was in Baltimore County, Allen was removed there for trial. He was indicted for murder on August 6, 1962; he was convicted on January 16, 1963. His motion for new trial being granted, he was retried on June 21, 1963, and convicted.

The case was appealed and on May 13, 1964, the Court of Appeals of Maryland reversed and remanded the case, Allen v. State, 234 Md. 366 , 199 A. 2d 237 . On April 1, 1965, the appellant was again tried and convicted. While his appeal was pending from the third conviction, the case of Schowgurow v. State, 240 Md. 121 , 213 A. 2d 475 was decided. As a result of this, the case was remanded for further proceedings on January 13, 1966.

On Allen’s motion on January 19, 1966, indictment was dismissed and the -conviction set aside. He was reindicted in Janüary, 1966, and his attorney’s pretrial motions were adversely decided by Judge Kenneth C. Proctor on March 4, 1966. The first questipn presented is one whether the State of Maryland has jurisdiction to try the appellant. The trial court refused to rule on this motion until the con ²⁵² elusion of all the testimony at the trial for the reason that, although the finding of the body in the State of Pennsylvania created a presumption the killing took place in Pennsylvania, the State is entitled to rebut the presumption and the matter could not be properly decided prior to the conclusion of all of the testimony.

Under Maryland Rule 1085 this Court can decide a question of jurisdiction which has not been passed on by the trial court where jurisdiction cannot be conferred by waiver or consent of the parties. We hold, however, that on the facts of this case we are also unable to decide the question until the conclusion of all the evidence in the case. The second question raised by Allen is whether or not the appellant has been denied a speedy trial under the Sixth Amendment to the