Carter v. State

⁶⁵⁰ Digges, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. In April of 1978 the petitioner, Howard Carter, was tried in the Criminal Court of Baltimore on two counts of armed robbery and two of using a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence. At the close of the State’s case in chief, counsel for the defendant made, among others, a motion in limine that: In the event Carter elects to testify in his own defense the prosecution be prohibited from attempting to impeach the credibility of the witness through the use of a 1967 robbery conviction in the Criminal Court of Baltimore. In support of this motion, the defendant seemingly suggested that, because he was a juvenile below the age of sixteen when the crime was committed and there was no waiver of jurisdiction to the Criminal Court, there exists no valid final judgment in the cause to serve as a basis for impeachment interrogation.

The trial judge denied the motion and the defendant refrained from testifying in his own behalf. Although found by the jury to be not guilty of two counts contained in the indictment, Carter was convicted on one count each of armed robbery and use of a handgun. Upon being sentenced to serve a total of thirty years in prison, the defendant noted an appeal to the Court of Special Appeals where he argued that the trial court had committed reversible error by refusing to grant his in limine motion. After concluding that the record was devoid of sufficient information relative to Carter’s age at the time the earlier crime was committed to enable it to answer the issue, the intermediate appellate court, in an unreported opinion, relied on Maryland Rule 1071 to remand the cause to the trial court for further proceedings.

The Criminal Court of Baltimore was ordered to determine, “directly and not by inference based on the time of arrest or indictment,” the factual question of whether the petitioner was a juvenile below the age of sixteen when the offense of which he had been earlier convicted was committed, and then to proceed to a determination of the legal issue which is dictated by that finding. Since we had, in light of our decision in Gill v. State, 265 Md. 350 , 289 A.2d 575 (1972), at the least a modicum of doubt as to the correctness ⁶⁵¹ of