Glover v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Lott Glover, the appellant, was convicted of murder in the first degree and of robbery in the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County and his appeal from the judgment and sentence which followed relies only on the one contention that the trial court erred in admitting his confession. Very early in the morning of January 29, 1952, Glover, intending to go to Philadelphia, left Washington in his automobile, accompanied by two women, Gertrude Mackail and Helen L. Dyson. About four-thirty A.M. they ⁵²⁴ arrived at an all night filling station in Beltsville on the Washington-Baltimore Boulevard.

Glover asked James Alfred Beacraft, the attendant, the way to Baltimore, and then drove down the road a short distance and stopped. He walked back to the filling station and shortly thereafter, returned to the car, carrying an automobile battery, two boxes of cigars and a hammer, which he placed in the car. About five-fifteen A.M. Beacraft appeared at the nearby house of the proprietor of the filling station in serious condition, having been beaten over the head with a blunt instrument. He explained that this occurred in the course of a robbery of the filling station.

He was taken to a hospital in Laurel and then to the University Hospital in Baltimore, where he died about eight o’clock, as a result of the beating. The State Police were notified by the owner of the filling station, and, outside of Laurel, Glover was stopped by a member of the Laurel Police force from whom he escaped into an adjoining woods. The two women attempted to make a similar escape but were seized and taken into custody as material witnesses. Glover was next seen, according to the testimony, in a pool parlor in Washington, whence he had gone by bus after coming back to the highway.

One Lucian Woolley played a number of games of pool with him there. Glover asked Woolley to go to his room to get him some clothes and barber tools. Woolley went to the room to be greeted there by the police. Glover had left the pool parlor when they returned.

The police picked up information that he had left Washington on a Greyhound bus for Baltimore and in the early part of the evening of the day the crime was committed, two State Policemen took him from the bus and to the Hyattsville. Police Station. He arrived there about eleven P.M. and was taken to the identification room of the Detective Bureau, where he remained a little over two hours. He was then identified in a lineup by Gertrude Mackall, and by George T. Johnson, the Laurel Policeman who had stopped him and from whom he had escaped. ⁵²⁵ All of this was either related or admitted by the appellant from the witness stand, or was not seriously questioned by him.

He claimed in his testimony that although he had robbed the filling station by means of a gun, which he had pointed at Beacraft, he had not struck him or harmed him in any way, and that the killing had been done by two of his friends who were following him from Washington .to Philadelphia in another car. They, he said, had come along as he was arguing with Beacraft, who struck him, and they told him to go ahead to Baltimore, where they would meet him after they had roughed up the attendant for what he had done. Soon after two o’clock on the morning of January 30, about three hours after reaching the police station, Glover confessed to the robbery and the murder of Beacraft, saying that he had “knocked him out with the butt of heavy pinch pliers”. In another place, he says that he “hit him up alongside the left ear . . . with a pair of a heavy duty pliers”.

The confession was taken down, question by question and answer by answer on a typewriter in the Detective’s room of the station. It began some forty minutes after Glover was first questioned there by a number of police officers. It is this confession which the appellant contends earnestly should not have been admitted, because it was not shown to meet the tests of admissibility which this Court has laid down. These tests were restated in Linkins v. State, 202 Md. 212, 222 , 96 A. 2d 246, 251 , decided this Term.

We said there, quoting from Smith v. State, 189 Md. 596 , at page 603, 56 A. 2d 818 : “Before a confession can be admitted in evidence, the State must show, to the satisfaction of the court, that it was the free and voluntary act of an accused; that no force or coercion was exercised by the officers obtaining the confession, to cause the accused to confess; that no hope or promise was held out to an accused for the purpose of inducing him to confess.” ⁵²⁶ Glover says that when he got to the Police Station at Hyattsville, they put him downstairs in a back cell and several police officers came in the cell, “started slapping me up with a short rubber hose”, but that he told them nothing. He says that they took him upstairs to the Detective’s room, that Woolley was invited to leave the room and then the Sergeant and the officers “give me the working over”. Woolley then came back and Glover and Woolley got into an argument, and according to Glover, the officers said that they would “take care of him.” He adds that then they were “giving me the third degree”. Finally, he says that after they had written down the statement, they held his hand and signed it for him by moving his hand and arm.

On cross-examination, he explained that by the third degree, he meant this: “I mean just like four or five or six men catch you and they have rubber hoses and they sap you up and knock you down on the floor and kick you and stomp on you with their feet.” The appellant argues that the State must show affirmatively that the confession was not influenced by any promise, threat or inducement of any kind, and that in the face of his testimony, that of the nine witnesses who were produced for the State, fails to add up to such an affirmative showing. In the argument here, the appellant contended in effect that none of the witnesses had been asked the leading and direct question: “Was the accused threatened, promised or induced?”, but rather that the question asked was: “Did you see anything unusual or out of the ordinary?” Reading of the evidence shows that the appellant’s contention is not sound and that the State did show, albeit in somewhat disconnected fashion, clearly and convincingly, that the confession was freely made. The first two witnesses, Policemen Wiseman and Thompson, who took Glover from the Greyhound bus, testified that they had no conversation with him other than to ask him his name and where he was going, and to tell him that if he were not the man they wanted, ⁵²⁷ they had arranged for him to continue his transportation to Baltimore without additional charge. This they said was the entire conversation and no more is claimed by the appellant.

Of the remaining seven witnesses, one was Woolley, the Washington poolroom acquaintance. His testimony is that he was taken to the Hyattsville Station early in the morning of January 30 and told that Glover was in the room to the right. He identified Glover as the man with whom he had been playing pool and whom he knew as Willie Green. They stayed in the same room until the arrival of Gertrude Mackall, who was brought over to Hyattsville from the Waterloo Barracks.

He estimates the time at about an hour and forty-five minutes. He left the room during this period only once, for some ten or fifteen minutes to go to the men’s room and to drink a Coca-Cola. After Glover had been identified by Gertrude Mackall and the Laurel police officer, he was taken upstairs to the Detective’s room and questioned in the presence of six police officers and the witness Woolley. All were there the entire time, from the beginning of the questioning, about one-thirty, until the confession had been typewritten and signed or initialled by those present, about three fifteen, except that Sergeant Bonaccorsy came in fifteen minutes after the questioning had begun.

Woolley says that when the confession was taken, Glover was sitting down at the desk, not handcuffed, but in fact, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee with the others. He is positive in his testimony that no one struck Glover while he was present and that he showed no signs of having been struck during the time, prior to the lineup, when the witness was out of the room. He says that he saw Glover sign the statement and then he initialled it. He says further that there were present in the room during the whole time, Detectives Keyser and Bailey, and Lt.

Thomson, as well as Detective Pearson and Sgt. Bonaccorsy. ⁵²⁸ Sergeant Pearson, who transcribed the confession, says that he had no conversation with Glover before the lineup, except to ask him whether he was the man they were looking for, and that there were present in the room, after the lineup, Lt. Thomson, Sgt. May, Sgt.

Bonaccorsy, Sgt. Bailey, Detective Sgt. Keyser and himself, as well as Lucian Woolley. He says that the appellant, after being questioned for about a half hour,