Commonwealth v. Turner
| Decision Date | 06 June 1957 |
| Citation | 389 Pa. 239,133 A.2d 187 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania v. Aaron TURNER, Appellant. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
Argued January 16, 1957
Editorial Note:
This Pagination of this case accurately reflects the pagination of the original published, though it may appears out of sequence.
Appeal, No. 320, Jan. T., 1956, from judgment of Court of Oyer and Terminer of Philadelphia County, June T., 1946, No 646, in case of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Aaron Turner. Judgment reversed.
Indictment charging defendant with murder. Before LITTLE, P.J. specially presiding.
Verdict of guilty, with penalty fixed at life imprisonment, and judgment of sentence entered thereon. Defendant appealed.
The judgment of sentence is reversed and a new trial granted with directions that, if the Commonwealth is not able to produce evidence of defendant's guilt by testimony of any greater legal sufficiency than what it offered at the trial here involved, a nolle prosequi be entered on the indictment.
Edwin P. Rome, with him Walter Stein, for appellant.
Thomas M. Reed, Assistant District Attorney, with him Victor H. Blanc, District Attorney, and James N Lafferty, First Assistant District Attorney, for appellee.
Before JONES, C.J., BELL, CHIDSEY, MUSMANNO, JONES and COHEN, JJ.
The trials of the appellant for murder for the same felonious homicide have amounted to a near tragedy of errors and all because the prosecution was initially conceived and undertaken on confessions wrung from the appellant and his co-defendants by coercive third degree police methods which served to render the confessions incompetent as evidence.
Five times, the appellant has been convicted by a jury of murder in the first degree. Upon each of the first four convictions, the penalty was fixed at death; at the fifth trial, which is now before us for review, the jury imposed life imprisonment. The court below overruled the defendant's motions in arrest of judgment and for a new trial and entered judgment of sentence on the verdict from which the defendant has appealed.
The first three convictions were also appealed to this court (see 358 Pa. 350, 58 A.2d 61; 367 Pa. 403, 80 A.2d 708; and 371 Pa. 417, 88 A.2d 915) and, each time, a new trial was ordered except that, upon the first appeal, the new trial did not eventuate until the case had been carried to the Supreme Court of the United States. There, our earlier judgment of affirmance was reversed on the ground that the defendant's confession, which had been introduced in evidence over his objection, had been coercively extracted from him while he was being held incommunicado by the investigating police officers: see 338 U.S. 62. The fourth conviction was not appealed. The trial court set aside the verdict and granted a new trial because of patently prejudicial trial error: see 1 D. & C.2d 11.
The facts of the killing for which the defendant was indicted fully appear in the opinion for this court on the first appeal: see 358 Pa. 350, 351, et seq., and need not be reiterated here in detail. For present purposes, it is sufficient to relate that about 5 P.M. Saturday afternoon, December 15, 1945, the brutally beaten bodies of two men, Charles Simmons and Frank Endres, owner and employee, respectively, of the Ace Broom Factory, located on North Second Street in Philadelphia, were found lying in pools of blood on the floor of the factory. Both men were unconscious and neither ever regained consciousness before dying as a result of his wounds. The only witness of the crime were its perpetrators and its victims.
The police interrogated many suspects and approximately five months later, viz., May 19, 1946, they took into custody one Clarence Lofton "relative to another murder" and not in connection with the broom factory killings. On June 3, 1946, Aaron Turner, the present appellant, was taken into custody around noontime by two Philadelphia detectives; and about 3 P.M. the same day the detectives arrested Jasper Johnson. Turner and Johnson along with Lofton were then detained by the police incommunicado until June 12, 1946, when they were delivered to the county prison.
On June 8, 1946, written confessions were obtained from Turner, Johnson and Lofton, each signing his own confession as well as the confessions of the other two. At Turner's first trial, the Commonwealth offered in evidence against him the confessions of all three accused. It is unnecessary here to restate the invalidating circumstances under which the confessions were obtained. Upon a review of Turner's first conviction, on certiorari to our judgment of affirmance, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the pertinent considerations left "open no other possible conclusion than that ... [Turner's] confession was obtained under circumstances which made its use at the trial a denial of due process" and that "the same considerations that bar admission of the confession by Turner made over his own name extend to his contemporaneous adoption of the Johnson and Lofton confessions": see 338 U.S. 62, 65.
As the confessions had constituted substantially the Commonwealth's entire case against the defendant at his first trial and with their exclusion upon a retrial thus foreordained by the Supreme Court's ruling, the Commonwealth was put to it to introduce other evidence to support the indictment. The fact is that the prosecution's subsequent efforts to meet the exigency of proof, thus occasioned, has been productive of reversible error at each succeeding retrial that has come before us for review. For a proper understanding of the background of the appellant's present complaint, reference to the subsequent trials and appeals is essential in order that the continuity of the pervading error may become the more apparent.
At the second trial the Commonwealth, deprived of the confessions, offered in evidence admissions made by Turner at a preliminary hearing before a magistrate on June 8th which was the fifth day of his vitiating detention and prior to signing of the confessions. The magistrate's hearing was held in the same building in which the suspects were being detained and constituted but a very brief interlude in the persistent police questioning to which Turner, Johnson and Lofton were subjected. In holding that this evidence was inadmissible, Mr. Chief Justice DREW said for this court, - "Turner's signed written confession has been deemed the result of inherent coercion. Certainly statements or admissions which he made at the preliminary hearing held during the coercive period and prior to his execution of the condemned confession must be considered tainted by the same infirmity. It is evident that the United States Supreme Court did not regard the interlude of the preliminary hearing as having purged the coercion. We are constrained to hold, therefore, that the testimony taken at the magistrate's hearing was inadmissible as evidence against Turner as was his confession:" 367 Pa. 403, 407.
The foregoing was the principal ground for our reversal of the judgment of sentence although additional error was also noted in the trial court's failure to submit to the jury second degree murder as a possible verdict and in the court's refusal to charge, upon specific request, that the testimony of Lofton, then a witness for the Commonwealth, was to be carefully scrutinized. Lofton, at his trial, had entered a plea of guilty to the charge of murder and had received a life sentence. But, the crucial error so far as substantive evidence in support of the verdict was concerned was the objectionable testimony derived from the magistrate's hearing.
The appellant had also assigned for error the trial court's refusal of his request that the Commonwealth's witnesses be excluded from the courtroom when not actually testifying. The importance of such a precaution became all too evident a little later when the two detectives, who had originally arrested Turner and had been present at, and had participated in, the June 3rd to 12th, 1946, interrogations of Turner, Johnson and Lofton, surprisingly gave incriminating testimony against Turner which they had never before disclosed to their superiors and specifically had not mentioned when testifying at the first trial. But, inasmuch as a new trial was being ordered because of the error already referred to, no mention was made in the opinion for this court with reference to the assignment of error based on the court's refusal to sequester the Commonwealth's witnesses.
With Turner's confession and, likewise, his admissions and statements at the magistrate's hearing thus effectually eliminated from the case, the Commonwealth at the third trial called Lofton as a witness and again introduced the testimony of the two police detectives which they had given for the first time at Turner's second trial and which, notably, was not until after the priorly all-important confession had been definitely excluded as evidence. The detectives' belatedly divulged testimony, which was designed to tie Turner to the actual commission of the homicides, consisted of what the two detectives said they had eavesdropped on June 6, 1946, from where they were secreted near a cell in which the three suspects (Turner, Johnson and Lofton) were allegedly then being held. What the detectives purportedly overheard is related in the opinion for this court on Turner's appeal (see 371 Pa. 417, 421) when the trial court's refusal to sequester the Commonwealth's witnesses upon request of defendant's counsel became the chief error for which we again reversed and ordered a new trial.
At the fourth trial Lofton refused to testify for the Commonwealth and responded to the district attorney's...
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