Walker v. State

Marbury, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. On November 11, 1959, Marshall’s Cut Rate Liquor Store in Baltimore City was robbed at gunpoint at approximately eight o’clock p.m. Robert Heyman, the manager, and a clerk, James Watson, were in the store at the time. A total of $30.00 was taken from these men and a little over $2400 was taken from the store’s cash register.

Watches valued in the aggregate of $75 were missing from a display case in the store following the robbery. As the result of this robbery, the appellant, Cornelius Walker, was arrested, tried and convicted on December 23, 1959, of robbery with a dangerous and deadly weapon charged in the first count of the indictment, and sentenced to twenty years in the Maryland Penitentiary. Walker appealed to this court, which affirmed the judgment of the lower court. Walker v. State, 223 Md. 243 , 164 A. 2d 287 .

He next filed a petition for Post Conviction relief in the Criminal Court of Baltimore, alleging that evidence illegally obtained had been used to secure his conviction. This petition was denied, and we also denied his application for leave to ap ⁵¹⁸ peal. Walker v. Warden, 226 Md. 653 , 172 A. 2d 407 . The Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari.

Walker v. Warden, 368 U. S. 960 , 7 L. Ed. 2d 391 . He next filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, alleging that he was being unlawfully detained as a result of conviction and sentence obtained through the use of unlawfully seized goods. The District Court found that the appellant had waived a right to raise this question since he failed to raise it on direct appeal in this Court, and also found that there was no basis for holding that the search was illegal. That decision was subsequently reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Walker v. Pepersack, 316 F. 2d 119 , in which that court relied on its views in Hall v. Warden, 313 F. 2d 483 , which held to be retroactive the decision of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, 6 L. Ed. 2d 1081 .

The Fourth Circuit remanded the petition to the District Court. That court