Taylor v. Pegelow, 9072.

• Decision Date: 28 July 1964
• Docket Number: No. 9072.,9072.
• Citation: 335 F.2d 147
• Parties: Charles W. TAYLOR, Appellant, v. Paul F. PEGELOW, etc., Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

335 F.2d 147 (1964)

Charles W. TAYLOR, Appellant, v. Paul F. PEGELOW, etc., Appellee.

No. 9072.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued June 23, 1964.

Decided July 28, 1964.

Harvey B. Cohen, Arlington, Va., Court-assigned counsel (Tolbert, Lewis & Fitzgerald, Arlington, Va., on brief), for appellant.

Plato Cacheris, First Asst. U. S. Atty. (C. V. Spratley, Jr., U. S. Atty., and MacDougal Rice, Asst. U. S. Atty., on brief), for appellee.

Before SOBELOFF, Chief Judge, HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judge, and HEMPHILL, District Judge.

HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judge.

This habeas corpus proceeding seems to have been predestined to frustration and ultimate abortion. Innumerable difficult questions and an inordinate waste of time of judges and lawyers might have been avoided if Taylor had sought to present his question in a more appropriate forum. Such things might also have been avoided if the District Court had appointed counsel for Taylor at the hearing it granted on the petition for habeas corpus. They might still have been avoided if someone at the hearing had thought to ask Taylor whether or not he really was without counsel when convicted in the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia in 1962, the one ground he asserted as the basis of his attack upon that conviction.

None of those things were to occur and the case has proceeded on its tortuous course to a fruitless end.

On June 17, 1961, Taylor was conditionally released on a good time discharge from Lorton Reformatory, 2,866 days of his original sentences of seven to twenty-one years then remaining unserved. On February 17, 1962, he was arrested in the District of Columbia and charged with keeping and selling whisky without a license and with carrying a deadly weapon. He was released on bail, but was rearrested on February 20, 1962, under a warrant issued by the District of Columbia Board of Parole charging him with violation of his conditional release. The whisky offense charge was nol prossed, but he was tried on April 13, 1962 and convicted of the charge of possession of a deadly weapon after having been convicted of a felony. This trial and conviction were in the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia, now known as the District of Columbia Court of General Sessions. On May 4, 1962, after a hearing in which he was represented by counsel, the Parole Board revoked the conditional release.

Taylor was thus remanded to custody at Lorton to serve concurrently a sentence of 360 days imposed upon him by the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia on the deadly weapon charge and the 2,866 days remaining unserved of the sentences imposed upon him in 1948.

In April 1963, Taylor filed a petition for habeas corpus in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia attacking his conviction on the weapons charge in the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia upon the ground that he was "without assistance of counsel as required by the Sixth Amendment * *" when tried and convicted in that Court. The District Court issued a rule to show cause why he should not be released and, upon an answer to the rule, held a hearing at which Taylor was present. During the course of the hearing, Taylor asked that counsel be appointed to represent him, but the request was denied, apparently, because at the time the request was made, the District Court thought the only question before it was the computation of the 1948 sentence, the 1962 sentence having been fully served. Several efforts by Taylor to broaden the inquiry were frustrated, and, as indicated at the outset, no one inquired of Taylor as to the actual circumstances under which he was tried in 1962; that is whether or not he was actually unrepresented by counsel when tried in the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia or was without effective assistance of counsel as Taylor alleged in his later response to the Warden's answer.

At the conclusion of the hearing, the District Court denied the petition for habeas corpus upon the ground that the 360-day sentence imposed by the Municipal Court had been fully served and his only remedy was a reapplication to the Parole Board of the District of Columbia for parole.

When the case came up to this Court we appointed counsel to represent Taylor. The attorney requested of the Court a transcript of the trial in the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia. Since it was asserted that the parole revocation on May 4, 1962 was entered as a matter of routine based upon the Municipal Court conviction on April 13, 1962, the validity of that conviction appeared to be crucial to the revocation of his parole or any further review of his continued confinement by the Parole Board without the encumbrance of the 1962 conviction. It thus appeared, as a preliminary matter, that the judgment of the Municipal Court might be such a present burden to Taylor that it ought to be vacated if it was not valid. Since the court-appointed counsel came into the case only upon this appeal, the necessity of a transcript of the proceeding under attack seemed plainly apparent.¹

We undertook to procure a transcript of the proceedings in the Municipal Court. The Comptroller General of the United...