Hamner v. State

• Decision Date: 26 October 1966
• Citation: 223 A.2d 532
• Parties: Richard A. HAMNER v. STATE of Maine et al.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

Page 532

223 A.2d 532

Richard A. HAMNER v. STATE of Maine et al.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Oct. 26, 1966.

Charles A. Lane, Portland, for plaintiff.

Richard J. Dubord, Atty. Gen., and John W. Benoit, Asst. Atty. Gen., Augusta, for defendants.

Before WILLIAMSON, C. J., and WEBBER, MARDEN, RUDMAN, and DUFRESNE, JJ.

DUFRESNE, Justice.

This is an appeal from the dismissal on motion of a petition for the writ of habeas corpus under 14 M.R.S.A. §§ 5502-5508.

On July 30, 1963, the petitioner, Richard A. Hamner, then a juvenile of the age of 16 years, was adjudicated to have committed a juvenile offense on a petition charging him with the larceny of an automobile valued at more than one hundred dollars. The Judge of the juvenile court sentenced him to the Reformatory for Men under 15 M.R.S.A. § 2611, (4 A). On June 7, 1964, while undergoing imprisonment at that institution pursuant to said judgment of sentence, Hamner escaped, but was promptly recaptured. In information proceedings in the Superior Court for the County of Cumberland with counsel representation, he entered a plea of guilty to the charge of escape and was sentenced and committed to the state prison for a term of two to four years. No appeal was taken from his state prison sentence.

The petitioner seeks to have his sentence and plea of guilty on the escape charge set aside on the grounds that his juvenile court sentence to the Reformatory for Men was a nullity, in that the juvenile court, so he alleges, lost jurisdiction of the cause and of his person when it proceeded without providing counsel for him and without advising him of his right to counsel. He contends that the deprivation of his constitutional right to the assistance of counsel in the juvenile proceedings rendered the court's sentence to the Reformatory for Men absolutely void and that he committed no crime of escape when he left the institution as he was merely escaping from unlawful detention.

The pertinent escape statute reads as follows: 'Whoever, being lawfully detained in any jail or other place of confinement, except the State Prison, breaks or escape therefrom, or attempts to do so, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 7 years.' (Emphasis supplied.) 17 M.R.S.A. § 1405.

The information charging him with escape and to which Hamner with the assistance of counsel entered a plea of guilty, reads in pertinent part as follows:

'that RICHARD A. HAMNER, or Mexico, in the County of Oxford and State of Maine, on the seventh day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty-four, was undergoing lawful imprisonment in the Reformatory for Men situated at Windham in the County of Cumberland and State of Maine, in pursuance of the sentence of the Honorable John L. Batherson, Associate Judge of the Juvenile Court for the Town of Rumford, held at Rumford, in the County of Oxford and State of Maine, on the thirtieth day of July, A. D. 1963 for a Juvenile offence, which offence was within the jurisdiction of said Court, and upon the seventh day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty-four, the said Richard A. Hamner did then and there willfully, unlawfully and feloniously from and out of said Reformatory for Men escape and go at large' etc.

The crime of escape necessarily requires in allegation and proof a lawful detention by virtue of commitment or sentence to an authorized place of detention by lawful authority. As stated in Smith, Petr. v. State of Maine, 145 Me. 313, 75 A.2d 538: 'The lawfulness of the detention is the very gist of the crime of criminal escape, and the commitment by lawful authority is the very essence of the lawfulness of the detention.'

The subject information on its face meets all the requirements of good pleading and constitutional exaction. The issue of lawful detention was before the criminal court and was laid to rest by virtue of petitioner's plea of guilty, as much so as if the issue had been contested by the petitioner and found against him by the jury. Our post conviction habeas corpus is not a substitute for appeal. Dwyer v. State, 151 Me. 382, 120 A.2d 276; Bennett v. State, 161 Me. 489, 493, 214 A.2d 667, 14 M.R.S.A. § 5502. It is not available to revise an adjudication of guilt upon a plea of guilty entered freely, knowingly, understandingly and with adequate counsel representation.

The State advances another reason why the petitioner should fail in these proceedings. It claims under the doctrine of stare decisis that 'the instant case is but an echo of the Beaulieu decision and that, therefore, the tone of that decision should be heard as controlling.' The reference case, Beaulieu v. State of Maine et al., 161 Me. 248, 211 A.2d 290 (1965), is similar in factual background except that the alleged escapee in Beaulieu at the time of his conviction of the underlying charge of larceny was not a juvenile.

Our Court therein stated: 'In our view the petitioner is not entitled in his attack upon the escape conviction to raise the alleged violations of his constitutional rights in the larceny case * * * Whether the rights of the petitioner were violated, and hence whether the larceny conviction should be upset, with a new trial thereon, are questions * * * for the Court in a proceeding directed to the larceny, and not to the escape. In an attack on the escape conviction, the petitioner seeks to raise a collateral attack on the larceny conviction. This he may not do.'

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