Rogers v. State

Per Curiam. The appellant was found guilty at a court trial in the Circuit Court for Kent County of assault and battery and sentenced to imprisonment for a term of three years. 1 His only contention ³⁶⁴ on appeal is that the sentence imposed was cruel and unusual in the constitutional sense. The contention was fully answered in Washington v. State, 2 Md. App. 633 , where we said, at 634-635: “It is well settled that imposition of sentence in a criminal case in this State is a matter peculiarly within the province of the trial judge, Reid v. State, 200 Md. 89 , Gee v. State, 2 Md. App. 61 ; and that a sentence will be reviewed on appeal only where grossly and inordinately disproportionate to the offense to such an extent that the sentence was evidently dictated not by a sense of public duty, but by passion, prejudice, ill will, or other unworthy motive. James v. State, 242 Md. 424 , Fisher v. State, 1 Md. App. 505 .

Assault and battery is a common law crime, for which no statutory limit governing punishment is prescribed, Miller v. State, 1 Md. App. 653 . A twenty-year sentence has been held not cruel and unusual in Roberts v. Warden, 242 Md. 459 and Adair v. State, 231 Md. 255 . Similarly, a ten-year sentence was held not violative of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment in Austin v. Director, 237 Md. 314 and Gleaton v. State, 235 Md. 271 .” The appellant argues that all he did was engage a young lady in conversation on a main street in Chestertown about 6:15 P.M. on a summer evening, walk her home with her dog, and kiss her on the cheek. But the evidence was clear that an assault and battery was committed by the appellant and was sufficient for the trial court to find that his actions were not as harmless as he would now have them appear.

The young lady, 20 years of age and married, was walking her dog about 6:15 P.M. when the appellant stopped her. “At first I didn’t think anything about it, but as he got closer to me I could tell he was quite intoxicated, and he kept telling about his work experiences and everything, and he kept petting the dog and rolling him down on the pavement, and he just wouldn’t let me go, kept talking to me and things like that, and finally he got the dog away from me and said he wanted to walk home. * * * He ³⁶⁵ was asking questions about where I worked and where my husband worked and what time he got home, and things like that and, well, he was wanting to take the dog down to the river too because he said he had three Labradors of his own and they needed a lot of water, and he kept wanting to know what time my husband got home from work. Well, at