Young v. Warden of Maryland Penitentiary

Horney, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. This is an application by John Austin Young for leave to appeal from the denial of a writ of habeas corpus by Raine, J., of the Circuit Court for Baltimore County. The applicant was tried and found guilty on October 25, 1957, of armed robbery by a jury in the Criminal Court of Baltimore City (Warnken, J.). Sentencing was suspended pending a motion for a new trial, but such motion was not filed, and he was sentenced on October 31, 1957, to twenty years in the Penitentiary.

The applicant in his twenty page petition to Judge Raine assigned approximately fifteen reasons why he should be granted the writ. As was noted by Judge Raine, his contentions were so worded that it is difficult to understand with any degree of certainty of what the petitioner complains. Moreover, much of his petition to Judge Raine was devoted to a complaint that former Judge Michael Paul Smith erroneously denied a previous application for the writ, from which the petitioner appealed, but subsequently withdrew the appeal. Judge Raine properly pointed out that most of his understandable contentions concerned the sufficiency of the evi ⁶³⁸ dence which could not be inquired into on habeas corpus.

Judge Raine was also of the opinion that the petitioner was not denied any of his constitutional rights and that there was no showing of any unfairness in his trial. In his application for leave to appeal, the applicant presented only seven questions, one of which—that the trial judge failed to inquire of the petitioner when he was sentenced if there was any reason why judgment should not be imposed—was presented for the first time on this application, and cannot be considered here. Wain v. Warden, 215 Md. 650 , 138 A. 2d 482 (1958). In this Court the applicant contends that he was “denied his right to procedural due process” because: (i) an alleged accomplice was his only accuser; (ii) he was not placed in a police line-up for identification by his accuser; (iii) he was placed in double jeopardy by the insertion on the face of the indictment of the words “see previous case”; (iv) the State’s Attorney presented (presumably to the Grand Jury) the evidence of his accuser, who held malice against the applicant; (v) his counsel committed fraud and deceived him when he filed a motion for