Jones v. State

Hammond, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appeal is from a judgment and sentence of death in a rape case. The trial was before the court without a jury and the testimony convinced the trial judge “beyond any possible doubt” that the then seventeen-year-old Negro defendant had thrice committed “bloody and painful, and agonizing” rape on an eleven-year-old white girl who “has been suffering excruciating mental torture ever since.” The appellant does not suggest that the guilty verdict was ⁵³² wrong or unjustified. He urges only that Judge Prendergast abused his discretion in imposing the death penalty because the victim has physically recovered, the defendant is young and the psychiatrists who had examined him on behalf of the State and the psychiatrist he had selected to examine him, although unanimously agreeing that the youth was sane, recommended that the death penalty not be imposed and that confinement at Patuxent Institution be substituted.

Imposition of the penalty of death for rape does not violate the proscription of Article 16 of the Declaration of Rights of the Constitution of Maryland against cruel and unusual punishment. Dutton v. State, 123 Md. 373, 385 . Almost always the matter of sentence in Maryland is within the province of the trial judge, and his choice, if it is within the limits of the law, will not be changed on appeal. The law on the point was precisely set out in Reid v. State, 200 Md. 89 , 92-93: “The imposition of sentence in a criminal case in this State is a matter peculiarly within the province of the trial judge who hears the case and sees the witnesses and the accused.

It is not cruel and unusual punishment if it is within the statutory limits prescribed for the crime of which the accused is found guilty, and the trial court alone has the right to determine the penalty within these limits .* * * The sentence in the case before us is within the statutory limit. * * * We have been referred to several cases from other jurisdictions which allow their appellate courts to review sentences. * * * As we have pointed out, the law in this State is different, and we have no such power, so that the decisions in these cases are not authority for our taking any such action. “Where the punishment is grossly and inordinately disproportionate to the offense, ‘so that the sentence is evidently dictated not by a sense of public duty, but by passion, prejudice, ill-will or any other unworthy motive, the judgment ought to be reversed, and the cause remanded for a more just sentence.’ Mitchell v. State, 82 Md. 527, 534 , 34 A. 246, 247 . Apple v. State, 190 ⁵³³ Md. 661, 668, 59 A. 2d 509 . Von den Bosch v. Swenson, 194 Md. 715 , 70 A. 2d 599 . The reports of this court disclose no case in which such action has ever been taken by it.” See also Merchant v. State, 217 Md. 61, 70 .

As was held in Reid: “In the case before us, we see no occasion to hold the punishment comes within the exception suggested in Mitchell v. State, supra.” Judge Prendergast deferred sentencing the appellant from April 6, the day of the trial, to May 26, noting that he delayed so that psychiatric reports could be made to him and so that his feeling of “revulsion and perhaps anger” on the day of trial would not influence his choice. The appellant sought to