Edwards v. State

Murphy, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Appellant was found guilty generally by a jury in the Circuit Court for Cecil County upon a two-count criminal information charging him with the grand larceny and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. He was sentenced by the court to six years under the jurisdiction of the Department of Correction. On this appeal, he contends (a) that the photographs of illegally seized items were improperly admitted in evidence, (b) that the State failed to produce any evidence before the jury showing that his oral confession was voluntary, (c) that a written confession of an alleged accomplice was improperly admitted in evidence against him in violation of Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123 , and (d) that the State failed to prove that he did not have permission to take and use the allegedly stolen automobile.

There was evidence adduced at the trial from which the jury could find that Joseph McCummings’s 1966 Chevelle automobile was discovered missing from his home in Maryland; that he notified the State Police in nearby Pennsylvania of the disappearance of his car; that on the following morning, Pennsylvania State Trooper Charles Zagorskie received a telephone call informing him that McCummings’s car might be found in a quarry in Pennsylvania on the property of Joseph Burke; that the trooper secured Burke’s permission to go on to the property and, although he could not locate the missing vehicle in the flooded quarry, he found, in a barn on the Burke property, various automobile parts, including a transmission bearing the last seven digits of the serial number of McCummings’s vehicle; that he confronted the ¹¹¹ Burke family with his findings, arrested the son, Gran-ville Burke, and took him to the police barracks in Pennsylvania where he gave a written statement admitting that he and appellant had stolen the Chevelle from in front of McCummings’s home and had taken the motor from the vehicle to appellant’s home for installation in his car. Trooper Zagorskie testified that he obtained three Pennsylvania warrants — one for appellant’s arrest, and two search warrants, one for appellant’s Pennsylvania residences and the other to search his 1955 Chevrolet. While undertaking to execute the warrants, the trooper observed appellant’s Chevrolet in a garage attached to his residence and upon looking at the car, the trooper observed that the motor in the car was being “worked on.” The officer, though unable to detect any numbers on the motor identifying it as having come from the stolen automobile, arrested the appellant and took him to the police barracks in Pennsylvania where he orally admitted that he and Burke had stolen the McCummings’s Chevelle, stripped it of its usable parts, and had taken the motor and installed it in his own Chevrolet. At the time of appellant’s arrest, there was no search and nothing was seized.

Subsequently, after appellant confessed, he gave the police permission to tow his Chevrolet to the police station. The police also secured the permission of appellant’s mother to take appellant’s car. At the police station, the car and its motor were photographed and these photographs were admitted in evidence at the trial over his objection. I The substance of the aforegoing evidence having been adduced at the hearing (out of the jury’s presence) on the pretrial motion to suppress the photographs, the court ruled that appellant had consented to the seizure of his automobile and, consequently, the photographs thereof were properly admissible in evidence.

As the court’s determination in this respect is clearly supported by the record, we need not consider the legality, vel non, of ap ¹¹² pellant’s arrest or of either the search or arrest warrants. Under both Pennsylvania and Maryland law, a warrantless search and seizure is valid where a proper consent is obtained. See Commonwealth v. Rundle, 216 A. 2d 57 (Pa.); Simms v. State, 4 Md. App. 160 . We think the consent given under the facts of this case constituted a valid consent and not simply an acquiescence to a claim of lawful authority, as in Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U. S. 543 .

We, therefore, conclude that the seizure of appellant’s car was lawful and that the photographs subsequently taken were properly admitted in evidence. 1 II Appellant contends that the State failed to produce any evidence before the jury showing that his confession was voluntarily given. The record discloses that at the pretrial hearing on voluntariness held out of the presence of the jury, the State produced testimony from which the trial judge could properly find that the statement was voluntarily obtained. While the State did not produce the ¹¹³ same evidence before the jury, as is