Towers v. Director

Moylan, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Elwood Towers, Jr., also known as Elmore E. Towers, was convicted on June 8, 1971, in a non-jury trial in the Circuit Court for Caroline County, of assault. He was subsequently transferred to Patuxent Institution for examination and evaluation. On March 30, 1973, a jury adjudged him to be a defective delinquent and he was committed to Patuxent for an indeterminate period of confinement.

This application for leave to appeal follows from that determination. This commitment proceeding was not the applicant’s first. The applicant was originally transferred to Patuxent for diagnostic evaluation on March 28, 1956, following convictions for assault and larceny. While incarcerated at Patuxent, he assaulted a fellow inmate and on June 26,1958, was additionally convicted of assault.

On March 17,1960, he was found to be a defective delinquent by the Circuit Court for Howard County and was committed to the Institution. Over ten years later, on December 9,1970, a jury found that he did no longer meet the definition of a defective delinquent, and he was released from Patuxent. Prior to the hearing in the instant case, the applicant filed a motion to dismiss the proceedings instituted by the State to declare him a defective delinquent, claiming that since a jury had “previously and recently” determined him not to be a defective delinquent, this determination was res judicata against the State in the present proceedings. The applicant argued that since Article 3 IB, Section 10 precludes an inmate from having his defective delinquency redetermined for a certain fixed period after an initial determination, the State should equally be limited from bringing the proceedings against him within a two or three year period of time.

The lower court denied his motion. The applicant asserts error in that denial. ²⁵⁰ The question of whether a prior determination that a person is not a defective delinquent is res judicata at a subsequent hearing on that issue was raised in Lambson v. Director, 231 Md. 656 . After having been adjudged at a court trial in the Criminal Court of Baltimore as not being a defective delinquent and committed to a penal institution, the applicant there was convicted and sentenced in another county for escape from that penal institution, again transferred to Patuxent for evaluation, and subsequently determined in the Criminal Court of Baltimore to be a defective delinquent. In remanding the case for further proceedings, the Court of Appeals, however, found it unnecessary to decide the res judicata contention since the Criminal Court of Baltimore lacked jurisdiction to hear the matter — jurisdiction was properly vested in the court that last