Daniels v. State

Manrey, J., by special assignment, delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellant was found guilty of murder in the first degree by a jury at his trial before a three-judge court. He was sentenced to death, from which judgment and sentence he has appealed to this Court. The indictment under which he was tried, which was returned by the Grand Jury for Montgomery County, charged that Eddie Lee Daniels, the appellant, Richard L. Simmons and James Sullivan, on April 22, 1956, feloniously, willfully and with deliberately premeditated malice aforethought did kill and murder Arthur Chyatte.

A severance was granted to the other two defendants, who filed affidavits of removal, and the case as to them was removed to another county for trial. The appellant through his court-appointed attorney filed pleas in which it was alleged: (1) that he is not guilty by reason of insanity at the time of the alleged offense, (2) that he is not guilty because he is insane now, and (3) that he is not guilty. The court overruled the defendant’s motion ⁹⁵ for a directed verdict of not guilty of murder in the first degree. The jury, by its verdict rendered June 12, 1956, found the defendant sane at the time of the commission of the offense, sane at the present time, and guilty of murder in the first degree.

Motions for a new trial and judgment N.O.V. were overruled by the court. The appellant in this Court contends that certain evidence was improperly admitted, and that the trial court should have granted his motion for a directed verdict of not guilty of murder in the first degree. Meyer Klein and his partner, Arthur Chyatte, owned and operated a business known as Quick Car Wash at 8808 Old Bladensburg Road, Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland, in a building located on the west side of Old Bladensburg Road, near its intersection with Piney Branch Road. The building is approximately 120 feet long by 23 feet wide.

Inside this building there is a small office along the north wall and about 10 feet from the front of the building. This office is approximately 4 feet by 10 feet in size. The entrance to it is through a door 24 inches wide facing the front of the building. Mr. Klein testified that on Sunday, April 22, 1956, preparatory to closing for the day, he went to this office at about five minutes of two.

Mr. and Mrs. Chyatte were in the office with him at about 2 o’clock, when Eddie Dee Daniels, a 28 year old colored man, who had been previously employed at the car-wash in November, 1955, for two days, appeared at the door to the office and asked Mr. Klein for 25$ in change so that he might make a telephone call. Mr. Klein gave him the change, and Daniels left. Klein then bent over to put some money left by the customers that day in the safe, when he heard a noise. He then stood up and noticed Daniels slamming the front door of the building and in about a second or so Daniels was in front of him at the entrance to the office.

Daniels said, “This is it, let’s have the money”. Pie had a small black gun in his right hand aimed at the witness. The safe is two feet wide and two feet deep and was located inside the office to the left of the entrance door. At that time, Daniels was about two feet from him and had ⁹⁶ a white handkerchief like a pillow case covering his face up to his nose.

Mr. and Mrs. Chyatte were in back of him in the office. Mr. Chyatte said, “Just a minute”, and as the witness was about to bend down to give Daniels the money, he heard the gun click and a shot fired. Mr. Chyatte fell on him knocking him down. Daniels then turned the gun on the witness and said, “Let’s have that money”.

The witness was kneeling on the floor. Daniels threw down a white cloth, like a pillow case, in which Klein put rolls of coins, and then Daniels said, “Let’s have the money”. Klein started putting bills in the bag and then Daniels said, “Let’s have them big bills”. He then pulled out another handful of money and put it in the bag, when someone knocked on the front door and looked in through the window.

Daniels then picked up the bag with the money and ran to the back of the building and through the rear door. Blood from the wound in Chyatte’s head was on the right side of Klein’s body, including his face, hand and leg. The bag in which the money was placed was also covered with blood. Daniels ran down an embankment in the rear of the building and across a used car lot to Piney Branch Road where two negro companions were waiting for him in a green, 1952 Oldsmobile sedan.

While running through the rear yard of the car-wash and across the used car lot, the appellant dropped a trench coat that he had been wearing and some of the money from the safe. When he got into the automobile, he dropped down out of sight in the back of the automobile which was driven south on Piney Branch Road toward the city of Washington, D. C. During the time that he was giving the money to Daniels, Mrs. Chyatte was moaning “You killed my friend, you killed my husband”, and she hollered “Give him the money”. Mr. Klein then ran out the front of the building and saw Daniels when he went down the steep embankment and ran after him screaming, but when he reached the bank he fell and lost his glasses and could not see anything that happened after that. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Kuntz, Jr., of Greenbelt, Md., were looking at automobiles on the used-car lot on Piney Branch Road.

Mr. Kuntz was looking inside an automobile. Mrs. ⁹⁷ Kuntz heard a noise at the top of the hill and upon looking up she saw a man running down the hill. At that time he was about thirty or forty feet from her. He continued to run, in what looked to her a crouched position, until he reached Piney Branch Road, where he got in a two-tone green Oldsmobile.

She identified the appellant in the court room as the man that she saw. There were two other people in the Oldsmobile which was then in motion, and after the appellant got in the rear seat, it proceeded on Piney Branch Road toward Flower Avenue. She was about 25 feet away when he entered the automobile, and she heard Daniels say the words “I” and “kill”. She then returned to the used-car lot and helped to pick up the money that had been dropped by Daniels, and which was later turned over to one of the police officers.

She saw on the ground the trench coat which Daniels testified at the trial he had dropped while in flight. She went to the Silver Spring Police Station several days later and identified Daniels from six or eight pictures of different persons that had been shown to her by the police. Mr. Kuntz first saw Klein when he fell down the embankment. Klein was in a state of shock, but he told him about the shooting.

Kuntz telephoned for an ambulance, using the telephone in the office at the car lot. He then went up to the car-wash building with Klein. There was no one in the building when they entered, and nothing was moved until the police arrived. He saw an unexpended (loaded) cartridge about a foot outside the office door.

This cartridge was subsequently picked up by a police officer, and was admitted in evidence, over appellant’s objection. Barbara Jean Castle, who lives in College Park, was riding in an automobile which turned from Bladensburg Road into Piney Branch Road, at about 2:10 o’clock P. M. on Sunday, April 22, 1956. As the automobile proceeded down Piney Branch Road, she saw a colored man running doWn the hill behind the car-wash building. He was holding something in his arms.

There was a white man following him, waving his arms. The colored man jumped in the back seat of a sea green Oldsmobile which was parked on the road, and which followed the car in which she was riding as it ⁹⁸ drove along Piney Branch Road, until her car turned off the road. The license number of the Oldsmobile was AW-1475. Later at the Takoma Park Police Station she identified a car as being of the same type with the same license plates as the one that she saw. 0 The police officers found the live or unexpended cartridge on the mat just outside the office door; an empty or expended cartridge casing, approximately two feet inside the office; and a slug or bullet about three feet inside the office, which wfere admitted in evidence, over appellant’s objection.

A cigar box containing the money that was picked up from the ground in the rear of the car-wash and from the floor of the office, although objected to by appellant on the ground of relevancy and materiality, was also admitted, but the appellant does not contend here that this ruling of the court was erroneous. Dr. Frank J. Broschart, the County Deputy Medical Examiner, made a preliminary examination of the deceased at the scene of the crime, and later the same day, he made a complete examination at a funeral home in Silver Spring to which the body had been removed. The cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage and exhaustion due to bullet wound through the skull. The bullet entered at the base of the skull in the mid-occipital region, and the exit was in about mid-skull two inches to the left of the mid-line.

The bullet went completely through the skull, and its direction was upward, forward and to the left, at an angle of about ninety degrees from the base of the skull. There were no other contusions or wounds found. On April 25, 1956, two officers of the District of Columbia Police Department were looking for Daniels in Washington, D. C. They were cruising in a scout car when they saw him on one of the streets of Washington, and when Daniels ran, they gave chase. One of the officers, Private Turner, abandoned the car and pursued Daniels on foot for about a mile, and finally arrested him in Capitol Heights, in Prince George’s County, Md. Later Detective Sergeant Hayes, of the Metropolitan Police Department, joined him.

Sergeant Hayes searched Daniels and found 30 one-dollar bills and ⁹⁹ a wrist watch in his pocket, which Daniels said he had stolen.Some of the bills contained brown marks and were offered in evidence over objection. Daniels was taken to the Seat Pleasant Police Station, where he was turned over to the Montgomery County Police, who transported him to Rock-ville. He was questioned there at police headquarters by Sgt. Treadwell, in the presence of Lieut.

Whalen, Capt. Linthicum, Sgt. Harding and Miss Hargitt, secretary to the Detective Bureau of Montgomery County. The questions and answers were taken in shorthand by Miss Hargitt, and a typewritten transcription thereof prepared by her which the appellant would not sign was admitted in evidence.

Daniels was taken to the Quick Car Wash by the police officers where they went over the scene of the crime. The State offered evidence tending to show that all of the statements made by the appellant and his answers to questions were freely and voluntarily made by him, and were not the result of any threats or violence, or inducements or promises. In his testimony at the trial, Daniels repeated the admissions and statements that he had made to the police. He admitted that he went there to rob the Quick Car Wash but not to kill the man; that he had the gun to frighten his intended victims; that the lady ran towards him first, the man who was shot then struck him on the neck, the lady was hitting him with her pocketbook, he then struck the man on the head with the butt of the gun, the gun went off (only one shot was fired), and the man grabbed his chest, slumped back and fell on the floor inside the little office of the car-wash.

He told of his hurried flight from the building after picking up the bag and the money when someone came to the front door, and of his escape in the automobile in which his two companions were waiting for him, and that he dropped his trench coat and some of the money as he ran across the lot in the rear of the building. He testified that when he was arrested he probably had some of the money obtained in the robbery in his possession; that some of it could have had blood on it; and that there was blood on the pillow case. Dr. Jacob Morganstern, a physician whose specialty is psychiatry, and who is employed by the Department of ¹⁰⁰ Mental Hygiene of the State of Maryland, and is Director of Correctional Psychiatry for the State of Maryland, was called as a witness by the appellant. Dr. Morganstern examined the appellant on May 31, 1956, at which time he made a number of psychological tests, and his diagnosis was that he had a sociopathic personality disturbance, which means that he had difficulties in adjusting to society.

He has his own moral code, which means that society is governed by him the way he sees society, and not in the way society is seen by other people. However, Dr. Morganstern stated that in his opinion the appellant is not insane, that he knows the difference between right and wrong, and that he has a capacity to reason and differentiate between right and wrong, and he knows the nature and consequences of his actions. Appellant’s first assignment of error is that the trial court should not have admitted in evidence the bullet or slug, the empty cartridge casing and the loaded cartridge found at the scene of the crime. It is urged that in the absence of any evidence to connect these items with the crime or the accused, they were not material or relevant, and their admission tended to inflame the minds of the jury and cast mere suspicion on the accused.

No one had entered the building where the crime had taken place before the arrival of the police, other than Mr. Kuntz, who testified that he entered the building with Mr. Klein immediately following the commission of the crime, and that everything in the building when the police arrived was just as he had found it. The police officers found all three of the objects within a few feet of the body and the position occupied by appellant during the commission of the crime. This Court has consistently held in many cases that evidence need not be positively connected with the accused or the crime committed in order to render it admissible, and that if there is a probability of its connection with the accused or the crime, then it is admissible. A lack of positive identification affects the weight of the evidence rather than its admissibility.

Typical of these cases are the following: Goldstein v. State, 179 Md. 697 (unreported), 22 A. 2d 471 . A burglary had been committed and the. defendants ¹⁰¹ were followed by police officers in the nighttime in a radio car. As the car overtook them, the men turned towards an open lot and threw something to the ground. After the men had been arrested and placed in the car, one officer looked on the lot, about five feet away, and found a pair of brown cotton gloves and a set of approximately twelve skeleton keys.

This Court held that the gloves and keys were properly admitted in evidence. In Wilson v. State, 181 Md. 1 , 26 A. 2d 770 , a small box and tube marked “Luenbach’s Paste” found by the county investigator in a waste basket in a doctor’s office on the morning of his arrest and a few hours after a miscarriage, were admitted in a prosecution against the doctor for abortion. Smith v. State, 182 Md. 176 , 32 A. 2d 863 , was a murder prosecution. The testimony of the medical examiner who performed the autopsy was that the fatal wounds were inflicted by a sharp instrument and could have been inflicted by the hatchet or axes offered in evidence.

The uncontradicted evidence was that the body was buried in a grave dug in a cement cellar. It was held that a pick, shovel, hatchet and axes found on the premises occupied by the appellant or in the cellar where the body of his wife was buried, were properly admitted in evidence even though there was no proof positively identifying these instruments as having been used in the commission of the crime. In Purviance v. State, 185 Md. 189 , 44 A. 2d 474 , the defendant, upon the approach of two police officers, ran around the corner and was seen reaching into his overcoat pocket. The officers observed him walking away from a fence, on the other side of which they found a number of dry lottery tickets on the snow.

Although the defendant was not seen actually to throw the lottery tickets where they were found, it was held that his actions and his statements as to why he went near the fence which was convincingly contradicted, amounted to probability that he had the lottery tickets in his possession, the weight of the evidence being a question for the jury. In Cox v. State, 192 Md. 525 , 64 A. 2d 732 , an automatic revolver and a box of shells which were taken from the home of the defendant’s brother were admitted in