Best v. Warden of Md. Penitentiary, 152
| Decision Date | 16 June 1964 |
| Docket Number | No. 152,152 |
| Citation | 235 Md. 633,201 A.2d 490 |
| Parties | James Alton BEST v. WARDEN OF the MARYLAND PENITENTIARY. Post Conviction |
| Court | Maryland Court of Appeals |
Before BRUNE, C. J., and HENDERSON, HAMMOND, PRESCOTT, HORNEY, MARBURY and SYBERT, JJ.
The applicant, James Alton Best, was found guilty of escape and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in the penitentiary, to begin at the expiration of the fifteen year sentence he was then serving for second degree murder. The escape occurred when the applicant, who had been taken to the University Hospital for medical treatment, walked off after his guard went to make a phone call to arrange for transportation back to the penitentiary.
The applicant's original petition for post conviction relief alleged, first, that he did not commit the crime of escape, as defined in Code (1957), Art. 27, sec. 139, since he was left unguarded and the hospital was not a place of confinement. He further asserts that it was the guard who violated the escape statute, by abandoning 'jurisdiction' or custody when he left the applicant unguarded. Second, the applicant contends that he received institutional punishment for the escape and thus his subsequent conviction and sentence therefor constituted double jeopardy. In an amended petition he raised a third contention, that his sentence deprived him of due process of law by denying him the opportunity of parole on the original sentence, and that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
The argument that the applicant did not commit the crime of escape since he was left unguarded and the hospital was not 'a place of confinement', is answered in Johnson v. Warden, 196 Md. 672, 75 A.2d 843 (1950). There this Court held that a prisoner was legally confined in the State Reformatory within the meaning of what is now Art. 27, sec. 139, even though he was allowed to work outside, unguarded, on a private farm, and that, when he escaped from the farm, he was subject to punishment for escape from the Reformatory. The same reasoning applies in the instant case, and thus the applicant was properly convicted of escape under Art. 27, sec. 139. Cf. Taylor v. State, 229 Md. 128, 182 A.2d 52 (1962). The claim that the guard had abandoned 'jurisdiction' or custody (even if it were assumed that he could lawfully do so), is negated by the fact that the only reason the applicant was left alone was to permit the guard to arrange for transportation back to the...
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...legal custody, was physically outside the prison area, Ford v. State, 237 Md. 266, 205 A.2d 809. An escape from a hospital, Best v. Warden, 235 Md. 633, 201 A.2d 490, from a reformatory farm, Johnson v. Warden, 196 Md. 672, 75 A.2d 843, and from the Sandy Point Correctional Camp, Taylor v. ......
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