Ford v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellant Ford is a young man who was serving a six months’ sentence at Hagerstown for operating a motor vehicle without a license when he was indicted for burglary and larceny ²⁶⁸ of an automobile. He was brought into the Criminal Court of Baltimore to stand trial by a “correctional officer” of the Maryland Correctional Institution. His handcuffs were removed and he asked and was granted permission to get a drink of water.

He broke away from his guard and ran out of the courtroom, but was recaptured on the street almost immediately and returned for trial on the pending indictments. He was subsequently indicted for and convicted of escape. 1 Judge Harlan imposed a two-year sentence for the escape, to begin at the expiration of the sentences he had imposed for burglary and larceny. Ford, evidently irked because the prison authorities had punished him by solitary confinement for a number of days before the trial (his gripe is that since he was not physically within the confines of the prison at the time of his escape he was not guilty of a breach of prison rules or discipline which would justify punishing him administratively at the prison), contends that the two-year sentence amounted to double jeopardy and was invalid. 2 The reasons the appellant has used to convince himself he should not have been punished by the prison authorities and again by the court are understandable but not legally sound. In Best v. Warden, 235 Md. 633 , the prisoner who had been taken from the penal institution to the University Hospital for medical treatment walked off after his guard went to telephone for transportation back to the penitentiary.

In challenging his conviction for escape on post conviction, the prisoner argued he did not commit the crime of escape as defined in Code (1957), ²⁶⁹ Art. 27, Sec. 139, “since he was left unguarded and the hospital was not a place of confinement,” and that since he had received institutional punishment for his escape his subsequent conviction and the sentence therefor constituted double jeopardy. Both contentions were rejected by this Court. We said (pp. 634-635) : “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 a prisoner was legally confined in the State Reformatory within the meaning of what is now Art. 27, sec. 139, even though he was allowed to work outside, unguarded, on a private farm, and that, when he escaped from the farm, he was subject to punishment for escape from the Reformatory.

The same reasoning applies in the instant case, and thus the applicant was properly convicted of escape under Art. 27, sec. 139. Cf. Taylor v. State, 229 Md. 128 , 182 A. 2d 52 (1962). The claim that the guard had abandoned ‘jurisdiction’ or custody (even if it were assumed that he could lawfully do so), is negated by the fact that the only reason the applicant was left alone was to permit the guard to arrange for transportation back to the penitentiary. “In regard to the second contention, institutional punishment was not the equivalent of a trial and the applicant was not put in jeopardy thereby.” The rule against double