Best v. Warden of Maryland Penitentiary

Sybert, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The applicant, James Alton Best, was found guilty of escape and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary, to begin at the expiration of the fifteen year sentence he was then serving for second degree murder. The escape occurred when the applicant, who had been taken to the University Hospital for medical treatment, walked off after his guard went to make a phone call to arrange for transportation back to the penitentiary. The applicant’s original petition for post conviction relief alleged, first, that he did not commit the crime of escape, as defined in Code (1957), Art. 27, sec. 139, since he was left unguarded and the hospital was not a place of confinement.

He further asserts that it was the guard who violated the escape statute, by abandoning “jurisdiction” or custody when he left the applicant unguarded. Second, the applicant contends that he received institutional punishment for the escape and thus his subsequent conviction and sentence therefor constituted double jeopardy. In an amended petition he raised a third contention, that his sentence deprived him of due process of law by denying him the opportunity of parole on the original sentence, and that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The argument that the applicant did not commit the crime of escape since he was left unguarded and the hospital was not a “place of confinement”, is answered in Johnson v. Warden, 196 Md. 672 , 75 A. 2d 843 (1950).

There this Court held that ⁶³⁵ a prisoner was legally confined in the State Reformatory within the meaning of what is now Art. 27, sec. 139, even though he was