Middleton v. Director of Patuxent Institution

Sybert, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County committed the applicant to the Patuxent Institution after a jury found him to be a defective delinquent. The State’s case was presented through Dr. Boslow, who is a psychiatrist and is the director of Patuxent. While there is no transcript of the testimony in the record before us, it does contain the report of the Patuxent staff, which relates the applicant’s criminal and other history and concludes that he is a defective delinquent.

The record indicates that Dr. Boslow informed the jury of the contents of ⁶²⁵ the staff report and testified in support of the determination of defective delinquency. The staff report shows that the applicant’s difficulties with the law began when he was twelve years of age and continued until his latest arrest at age nineteen. They included incorrigibility, two separate charges of breaking and entering, larceny, auto theft, vagrancy, carrying a concealed weapon and violation of probation. In this application for leave to appeal from the order committing him to Patuxent, the applicant makes two contentions.

The first is that Dr. Boslow erroneously stated to the jury that the applicant had been convicted of receiving stolen goods, when in fact he had not been convicted of that crime. Secondly, the applicant alleges that Dr. Boslow referred in his testimony to two convictions of the applicant in the State of Florida and that these should not have been used against him in the State of Maryland to aid in securing a determination that he was a defective delinquent. We see no need to order a transcript of the proceedings in the lower