Commonwealth v. William J. Corcoran. Commonwealth v. Theresa Duggan

• Citation: 252 Mass. 465
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
• Decision Date: 22 May 1925
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. WILLIAM J. CORCORAN. COMMONWEALTH v. THERESA DUGGAN & others.

252 Mass. 465

COMMONWEALTH v. WILLIAM J. CORCORAN. COMMONWEALTH v. THERESA DUGGAN & others.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Middlesex.

May 22, 1925

March 6, 1925.

Present: RUGG, C.

J., CROSBY CARROLL, WAIT, & SANDERSON, JJ.

Attempt to Extort. Conspiracy. Evidence, Of intent, Of conspiracy, Relevancy and materiality, Competency. Witness, Cross-examination Corroboration. Practice, Criminal, Order of evidence, New trial, Matters preliminary to trial. Jury and Jurors.

At the trial of indictments under G.L.c. 265, Section 25, charging the defendant, who was an attorney at law, with verbally threatening a certain person to accuse him of the crime of adultery with intent thereby to extort money from him, and also charging the defendant as principal and others as accessories to the same act, where there was evidence of acts of the defendant and others in the furtherance of a prearranged scheme to trap the person named in the indictment in compromising circumstances with women, it was held, that evidence, that the defendants had entered into a general scheme to extort and defraud others substantially by the same means as alleged in the indictment, properly was admitted to show the intent and purpose with which the defendants acted and that the acts charged were part of a common scheme.

At the trial of the indictments above described, there was evidence that, under a plan arranged by the principal defendant after he and another attorney had investigated, through credit agencies, the financial standing of the man named in the indictment, two women, charged as accessories, enticed the man to an apartment, the letting of which the principal defendant had arranged for; that the principal defendant furnished intoxicating liquor for the purpose; that at a prearranged signal an accessory entered and discovered the man and the women in compromising relations; that the principal was sent for and advised the man as an attorney, and another attorney also was sent for to pose as the attorney for the husband of one of the women and threatened to have the man prosecuted that after feigned negotiations between the attorneys, the principal defendant said to the man, "Well . . . you will either have to settle or you are apt to go to jail"; that the man asserted that he had no money, and that later the principal defendant said to the other attorney that he believed the man was telling the truth when he said he had no money and that he was going to turn him over to his brother and let the brother "get a fee out of him anyway."

Held, that (1) A finding was warranted that in the circumstances in which they were uttered the words of the principal defendant to the man constituted a threat to accuse him of the crime of adultery with intent to extort money from him;

(2) The contract between the principal defendant and the credit agency to which he applied for the rating of the man in question, and tickets or requests for information concerning the financial standing of different persons applied for by the principal defendant properly were admitted in evidence, it appearing that the trial judge carefully excluded all tickets or calls for information made by the defendant which were not shown to be relevant to the issue whether a conspiracy or plot had been entered into by the defendant to extort money from the man named in the indictment by means of a threat to accuse him of a crime;

(3) It was proper to refuse requests asking for rulings in substance that no threat to extort money could be found to have been made unless the man alleged to have been threatened "actually, consciously understood that the defendant verbally and maliciously threatened . . . to accuse him of the crime . . ."; and that "There can be no threat to extort money unless the threat is conveyed to the mind of the person alleged to be threatened";

(4) The Legislature did not make the commission of the offence described in G.L.c. 265, Section 25, dependent upon the state of mind of the person threatened, and there is no occasion for reading into the statute qualifications not there found;

(5) An instruction to the jury, "it is not necessary, to constitute the crime, that the person who is threatened shall, in fact, be intimidated, provided the threats are such as are calculated to intimidate or put in fear an ordinarily firm and prudent man," it seems, was more favorable to the defendant than a correct construction of

G.L.c. 265, Section 25, warranted; (6) Verdicts of guilty were warranted;

(7) Exceptions to the refusal of requests for instructions to the jury relating to the bearing and effect of portions only of the evidence were overruled;

(8) It was proper to refuse a request for a ruling that the jury were bound to find that the man named in the indictment was not threatened with prosecution for any crime if they believed his testimony, where it appeared that he had testified to the main facts of the entry of the accessories and the coming of the principal defendant and of the other attorney and in cross-examination had stated that the principal defendant had not threatened him and that there had been no question of money raised; since the question, whether the statement of the principal defendant, which others had testified to, was made was a question of fact for the jury, and the question, whether, if made, it could have been found to constitute a threat, presented a question of law for the court;

(9) The Commonwealth was not bound to prove the exact threatening words alleged in a bill of particulars which it filed: it was sufficient that their substance was proved;

(10) How far the cross-examination of a witness may be relevant to the issue on trial must be left largely to the sound discretion of the trial judge, and his rulings on such questions are not open to revision unless the substantial rights of a party are clearly shown to have been prejudiced, which did not appear in the case at bar;

(11) It was proper to admit in evidence a confession made by one of the defendants to the Attorney General, the question whether the confession was made voluntarily being left to the jury specifically to determine, and they being instructed to disregard it if they found it was not made voluntarily;

(12) A motion to strike out evidence from which it could have been found that, before the commission of the crime for which the defendants were being tried, a plan or scheme had been formed to commit offences of a similar nature, including an attempt to extort money from the person named in the indictment, properly was denied although it did not appear that all the defendants were parties to the former transactions, since it could have been found that the other plots were parts of a fraudulent conspiracy which included the plot described in the indictment;

(13) It appearing from recross-examination of a woman charged as an accessory, who testified for the Commonwealth, that she did not recollect whether she had mentioned, in a previous statement to the

Attorney General, an incident which she had testified to in her redirect examination, the Commonwealth properly was allowed to overcome the tendency of such testimony to show that the witness's testimony in redirect examination had been of recent fabrication by showing that she had related that incident to her attorney previous to testifying before the grand jury.

The order in which evidence is admitted rests in the discretion of the trial judge, to the exercise of which discretion no exception lies.

An exception to a ruling by the trial judge, denying a motion for a new trial supported by evidence which was contradicted, must be overruled.

TWO INDICTMENTS, found and returned on February 19, 1924, the first charging that the defendant Corcoran "did verbally maliciously threaten one Kenneth Merrill, to accuse him of a crime, to wit: adultery, with intent thereby to extort money from the said Merrill," and the second charging the defendant Corcoran as principal to the same crime and the defendants Theresa Duggan, Lillian H. Reese, Thomas Moran, Theodore Bearse and J. Warren Kane, as accessories before the fact.

In the Superior Court, the indictments were tried before Whiting, J. The testimony of Kenneth Merrill, called by the Commonwealth, was as follows: "That he knew the defendant Theresa Duggan and the preceding witness, Mrs. Reese; that he met them some time in the fall of 1919; that he had been introduced to them by a mutual friend named Gordon; that at some time later he visited them at the apartment at 88 Hancock Street in Cambridge; that he went by invitation, which he received over the telephone; arrived some time in the evening, but did not remember the exact time; that already there were Mrs. Duggan and Mrs. Reese; that when he went there he understood there was a dinner party of some sort to which he had been invited to attend; that he stayed to dinner with the two women; that they had several drinks; that he remembered more drinks afterwards, that he became ill and nauseated, and that he laid down in the bedroom; that he could not recall whether or not the women, or either of them, were in the bedroom; after he had been lying there a short time several men came into the room and represented themselves as police officers; that he was certain he should not be able to recognize any of the men because it was a good while ago and he was in rather an excited condition at the time and he did not believe he would recognize them. After the men came in they represented themselves as police officers and threatened him with arrest, and made the statement that he should be taken to the station house. One of the women, he thought Mrs. Reese, asked the privilege of calling her counsel, which she did, as he...