Greenwell v. State

Powers, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. ⁵⁸⁰ James Ottie Greenwell, indicted in Dorchester County on two charges of murder, was tried in Kent County before a jury and Judge Harry P. Clark. From his convictions of first degree murder in each case, and sentences to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment, he took this appeal. Only one question is raised in this Court. It is stated in appellant’s brief in these words: “Did the trial judge err in overruling the motion to suppress incriminating statements made by Appellant during custodial interrogation conducted before Appellant obtained counsel, where persuasive evidence showed that Appellant had a learning disability which substantially affected his capacity to make a knowing and intelligent waiver of his constitutional rights?” The bodies of William Glazier and his wife, Dorothy Glazier, were discovered in the bedroom of their home in Dorchester County at about 7:00 A..M. on 23 September 1974.

Each had been killed, probably two days earlier, by shotgun fire. 1 The indictments against appellant charged that he murdered the two victims. The cases were removed to Somerset County, and from there were removed to Kent County for trial. The trial began on 14 July and was concluded on 19 July 1975. Appellant moved to suppress oral statements made by him while he was in custody.

The motion was heard separately, out of the presence of the jury, during the course of the trial. The transcript of the separate hearing covers about 370 pages, and records the testimony of five police officers, a psychiatrist, and Greenwell’s employer, all called by the State, and of a clinical psychologist, called by the appellant. Judge Clark’s ruling that the statements were admissible in evidence is the basis of the only issue before us in this appeal. ⁵⁸¹ Evidence at the suppression hearing showed that at noon on 23 September 1974 State Trooper Ralph Lewis, at the request of another officer, located Greenwell at Cordova, in Talbot County, and asked Greenwell to come with him to the Dorchester County Sheriffs office at Cambridge. At the Sheriffs office Greenwell was questioned, at about 1:00 P.M., by Detective Sgt.

Joseph Keating of the State Police, and by Thomas Roe, an investigator for the Sheriffs office. He made what they described as an oral statement. From Cambridge Greenwell was taken to Salisbury by Roe and Corporal Donald Cox, of the State Police. At Salisbury Greenwell was given a polygraph test by State Police Corporal Charles Griffith, after which he made an oral statement to Griffith, Cox, and Roe.

Back at Cambridge, at about 6:00 P.M. on the same day, Greenwell made a third oral statement to Roe and Cox, in the presence of a court reporter, who recorded and transcribed what was said. Two days later, on 25 September 1974, Greenwell made a fourth oral statement, this time at the State Police office in Cambridge, in the presence of Roe and Cox. According to the undisputed evidence, before any interrogation was begun on each of the four occasions, an officer read each of the so-called “Miranda warnings” to Greenwell, and he responded that he understood. On two of the occasions he signed a waiver on the paper on which the “warnings” were printed.

Also undisputed was the evidence that the statements were not induced by any force, threats, or promises, and that each of the statements was entirely voluntary. A fundamental responsibility of our system of criminal justice is to provide a means by which both society and a person accused of crime may participate together in the search for truth, within a framework of rules of law and procedure designed to assure fairness to both. When a crime is known to have been committed, it becomes not only the right, but the duty of law enforcement officers to investigate — to search for facts — to search for the truth — to the end that the person who committed the crime may be dealt with as justice requires. An officer may ⁵⁸² seek information wherever it can be found.

He may, indeed, ask the very person he suspects of guilt, “Did you commit this crime?” If the person suspected is later charged and brought to trial, his response may be offered in evidence against him at the trial. Two different constitutional principles may bear, simultaneously, or independently of each other, on the question of admissibility of that evidence. One is that it must be shown that the statement was not induced by force, threats, or promises, but was made freely and voluntarily. The other is that when the statement stems from a custodial interrogation, it must be shown that the accused knew and understood that he had a constitutional right not to be compelled to be a witness against himself, and that he voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently waived his rights.

The requirement that the statement be made voluntarily is of long standing. It was expressed by the Court of Appeals in Nicholson v. State, 38 Md. 140 (1873), when it said, at 153: “Without undertaking to lay down any general rule on this subject, or attempting to define the nature and character of the inducements held out to a prisoner, which would render his confession inadmissible; for this must necessarily depend very much upon the particular circumstances of each case; it is very clear upon all the authorities, that if the confession of the appellant had been induced by any threat of harm, or promise of worldly advantage held out to him by Crone, or by his authority, or in his presence and with his sanction, it ought to be excluded. “The law is also well settled that the onus is upon the prosecutor, to show affirmatively, that the confession proposed to be offered was not made in consequence of an improper inducement. 1 Taylor, sec. 796. In the language of Baron Parke in Reg. v. Warringham, 2 Den. C. C. 448, note, the court must be satisfied that the confession sought to be used in evidence against the prisoner, ‘was not obtained from him by improper means.’ ” ⁵⁸³ The rule has continued to be applied in Maryland.

In Smith v. State, 189 Md. 596 , 56 A. 2d 818 (1948), the Court of Appeals said, at 603-04: “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.” Involved in the reasoning of some of the earlier cases and writers was the likelihood that a forced confession may be untrustworthy. The Supreme Court of the United States rests the rule squarely upon the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Mr. Justice Frankfurter said for the Court in Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U. S. 534 , 81 S. Ct. 735 , 5 L.Ed.2d 760 (1961), at 540-41: “Our decisions under that Amendment have made clear that convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.

See Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227 ; Lisenba v. California, 314 U. S. 219, 236 ; Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, 172-174 ; Spano v. New York, 360 U. S. 315, 320-321 ; Blackburn v. Alabama, 361 U. S. 199, 206-207 . And see Watts v. Indiana, 338 U. S. 49, 54-55 . To be sure, confessions ⁵⁸⁴ cruelly extorted may be and have been, to an unascertained extent, found to be untrustworthy. But the constitutional principle of excluding confessions that are not voluntary does not rest on this consideration.

Indeed, in many of the cases in which the command of the Due Process Clause has compelled us to reverse state convictions involving the use of confessions obtained by impermissible methods, independent corroborating evidence left little doubt of the truth of what the defendant had confessed. Despite such verification, confessions were found to be the product of constitutionally impermissible methods in their inducement. Since a defendant had been subjected to pressures to which, under our accusatorial system, an accused should not be subjected, we were constrained to find that the procedures leading to his conviction had failed to afford him that due process of law which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees.” The Supreme Court said further, at 544-45: “The attention of the trial judge should have been focused, for purposes of the Federal Constitution, on the question whether the behavior of the State’s law enforcement officials was such as to overbear petitioner’s will to resist and bring about confessions not freely self-determined — a question to be answered with complete disregard of whether or not petitioner in fact spoke the truth. The employment instead, by the trial judge and the Supreme Court of Errors [of Connecticut], of a standard infected by the inclusion of references to probable reliability resulted in a constitutionally invalid conviction, pursuant to which Rogers is now detained ‘in violation of the Constitution.’ A defendant has the right to be tried according to the substantive and procedural due process requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This means that a vital confession, such as is involved in ⁵⁸⁵ this case, may go to the jury only if it is subjected to screening in accordance with correct constitutional standards. To the extent that