Wentworth v. State

Moylan, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appellant, Ann Louise Wentworth, was convicted in the Circuit Court for Dorchester County by a jury, presided over by Judges C. Burnam Mace and Charles E. Edmondson, of murder in the second degree, of kidnapping and of two counts of armed robbery. The case had been removed for ¹¹² trial from Somerset County to Dorchester County. The appellant raises three contentions: 1) That an improper jury instruction was given contravening her right to due process as set out in Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U. S. 684 , 95 S. Ct. 1881 , 44 L.Ed.2d 508 (1975); 2) That the evidence was legally insufficient to permit the kidnapping charge and the murder charge to go to the jury; and 3) That a copy of a letter was erroneously introduced in contravention of the “best evidence rule”.

Simply to set the stage factually and also to illustrate the shift in focus that occurs when an appellate court reviews the same evidence for different purposes, we note that the evidence was amply sufficient to permit the case to go to the jury on both the charge of murder and the charge of kidnapping. The initial crime and the nationwide manhunt that followed in its wake were highly publicized. On the evening of April 3 and the morning of April 4, 1974, James Mosley, the chairman of the art department at the Princess Anne Branch of the University of Maryland, was kidnapped and brutally slain. The principal State’s witness was Dr. Delores Taylor, the assistant dean at Salisbury State College, with whom Mosley lived in a house trailer on Peggy Neck Road in Somerset County.

The appellant was a student of Mosley’s at the Princess Anne campus. The testimony of Dr; Taylor alone sufficiently established the facts that the appellant and her husband, David Wentworth, came to the trailer at approximately 9:30 p.m. on April 3. Although there was one discussion involving the repayment of a loan of $200, the visit initially was socially convivial. The visitors were offered drinks.

The appellant had two drinks and her husband four. Approximately 45 minutes into the visit, the conversation took a nasty turn when David Wentworth suddenly accused Mosley of having had an adulterous affair, with Wentworth’s wife, the appellant. This Mosley denied. At that point, Wentworth suddenly pulled a gun.

Mosley was ordered to lie down on the floor with his hands behind his head. Wentworth then ¹¹³ asked the appellant if there had been an adulterous relationship and the appellant replied, “Yes.” Wentworth learned from Mosley that there was a .22 caliber pistol in the bedroom. He sent the appellant to get it and later sent her back to get bullets for the gun. Wentworth loaded the gun and put it in his pocket.

Under the insistent demands of Wentworth to own up to the adultery, Mosley finally said, “Well, if it means saving my life, I’ll say yes.” Wentworth again told the appellant to search the bedroom area of the trailer for guns, narcotics and money. She did so. Wentworth took from Mosley the keys to Mosley’s car. He gave the keys to the appellant, who went outside and started the car.

Wentworth took Mosley’s wallet. The appellant took some money from Dr. Taylor’s pocketbook. Wentworth informed both Dr. Taylor and Mosley that he was going to take them for a ride, handcuff them to a tree and then return to search the trailer. The appellant also wiped fingerprints from surfaces which she had touched in the kitchen-dining area.

Dr. Taylor seized a sudden opportunity and ran out of the trailer. She fled across a field to a neighbor’s house. She summoned the police and then, with a neighbor armed with a shotgun, returned to the trailer and found no one there. Mosley’s body was found the following morning on the shoulder of a road with bullet wounds in the back of his head and across his back.

A neighbor testified that she heard approximately eight shots fired at about 11:35 p.m. on the night of April 3. Two .357 and two .22 slugs were recovered from the victim’s body. An all-points F.B.I. bulletin was put out for both the appellant and Wentworth. A week later, their car was recovered in Georgia, where another car had been rented.

The appellant and Wentworth were arrested on May 5, 1974, in Idaho. Five of Mosley’s credit cards were in Wentworth’s pocket. Also recovered was a .357 magnum which matched ballistically two of the bullets taken from Mosley’s body. The evidence was legally sufficient to sustain all charges against the appellant. 1 ¹¹⁴ The Jury Instruction under Mullaney v. Wilbur We now turn our attention to the advisory instructions given to the jury.

They were both confusing and unconstitutional. In pertinent part, the instructions ran: “Felonious homicide in Maryland is divided into murder and manslaughter. Murder is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Manslaughter, generally, is defined as the involuntary killing not done with a specific intent to take a life or where the killing was done with reckless and negligent indifference to the lives and safety of others and the wanton disregard of another man’s life.” If a definition of manslaughter was to be given at all, the more appropriate definition would have been of voluntary manslaughter.

The notion of involuntary manslaughter had no arguable relationship to the facts of this case and can only have served to confuse the jury. The instruction then went on: “In the absence of justification, excuse, or some circumstance of mitigation, the law presumes that all homicides are committed with malice aforethought and constitute murder.” Unless the suggestion here is that the “intent to kill” is being presumed, this sentence describes no presumption at all. The absence of justification, excuse or mitigation is set out as a “given” fact from which the presumption will be launched. Since the only thing to be presumed, however, is already given as established, there is nothing left to presume.

See our analysis of this meaningless statement in Evans v. State, 28 Md. App. 640 , 349 A. 2d 300 , Part IIGe. With the absence of justification, excuse or mitigation as a given fact, ¹¹⁵ that part of the instruction which immediately follows is incomprehensible: “The burden is on the person accused to show circumstances of excuse or justification to reduce the offense to manslaughter.” The thing, of course, which reduces murder to manslaughter is not “excuse or justification,” which would totally exculpate a defendant, but rather some circumstance of mitigation. The placing of a burden on the accused, moreover, flies directly in the face of Mullaney v. Wilbur, as analyzed in Evans v. State, Part IIG. That part of the instruction which followed repeated the error of presuming all homicide to be murder in the second degree: “Where murder is divided into grades, as it is in Maryland, such a homicide is presumed to be murder in the second degree, and the burden to show that the killing was willful, deliberate and premeditated and thereby raise it to murder in the first degree is on the state.

The essential difference between murder and manslaughter, therefore, is the presence or absence of malice.” In concluding this part of the instruction, the court again erroneously placed the burden upon the defendant of reducing murder to manslaughter by showing an absence of malice (what needs be negated, of course, is not malice in all of its aspects but only a single aspect — the absence of mitigation): “In perhaps simpler words, the burden is on the State to raise a homicide to first degree murder by showing willful premeditation and malice aforethought. The burden is on the Defendant, on the other hand to reduce murder to manslaughter by showing an absence of malice.” Even an academically incorrect instruction under ¹¹⁶ Mullaney v. Wilbur, however, will not require a reversal unless it operates to relieve the State of its rightful burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt the absence of justification or excuse or the absence of mitigation, where one or more of those issues has been generated by the evidence as a genuine jury question. In looking now to see whether any issue of justification, excuse or mitigation had been generated in favor of the appellant by the evidence in the case, we will now view the evidence, and all inferences fairly deducible therefrom, in a light most favorable to the appellant, in contrast to the very opposite focus we employed in viewing the legal sufficiency of the evidence. There was no issue generated as to either justification or excuse.

The defensive theory offered by the appellant was that of coercion or duress. The appellant herself testified that her husband was “very paranoiac and was in another fit of rage.” She stated that she was deathly afraid of him once he pulled the gun and made the accusation as to adultery. She stated that as she was driving the car while her husband was holding the gun on Mosley, “I felt that I would be killed at any minute and that Mr. Mosley would be killed at any minute.” She attributed her husband’s irrational behavior that night to the combination of alcoholic beverages with the medication he was taking for a nervous condition. She testified that she had lived through a similar incident with her husband in 1971 when he attacked her father after similarly drinking and taking medication.

She testified that on the evening of April 3, “When he pulled out the gun, his eyes.changed, his eyes were glassy, it looked like he was in a trance. He acted like a maniac, he was irrational, unpredictable, without reason ... I was terrified because I had only seen this one time before in my life and I knew that one time, which I explained earlier, was the intention of killing my father.” She explained that she could not escape from her husband during the month-long flight after the killing because her husband never let her out of his sight. A psychiatrist who had treated the appellant testified that ¹¹⁷ in his opinion, her actions on the night of April 3 were not voluntary: “If I may elaborate, this carries right back to Ann’s second memory as a child, and that was of her father choking her mother, and you might say did she participate in that, she participated by being there, but she was unable to speak for a month after that . . .

Because of her continued response to violent scenes that she grew up in, it was her response to lay low and do as you are told and not aggravate the beast so to speak. And by continued response or by having learned how to respond in angry violent situations, this then takes it out of her full voluntary control. She has learned to respond to violent situations by laying low and doing what you are told and not to aggravate the angry beast.” There was, to be sure, evidence pointing in the other direction, but for present purposes, we will take that version of the facts most favorable to the appellant. Assuming that all of the relevant criteria are met, duress, coercion or compulsion is ordinarily a valid defense to a charge of crime.

The general rationale is well set out in LaFave and Scott, Criminal Law (1972), at 374-375: “One who, under the pressure of an unlawful threat from another human being to harm him (or to harm a third person), commits what would otherwise be a crime may, under some circumstances, be justified in doing what he did and thus not be guilty of the crime in question. The requirement for this defense of duress is that a threat of a human being which operates upon the defendant’s mind, rather than of the pressure of a human being which operates upon his body (as where A pushes B against C, causing C to fall over the cliff where the three are