Hancock v. Nelson, 6524.

Decision Date08 July 1966
Docket NumberNo. 6524.,6524.
Citation363 F.2d 249
PartiesParker L. HANCOCK, Warden, Respondent, Appellant, v. Russell NELSON et al., Petitioners, Appellees.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Alexander J. Kalinski, Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom William Maynard, Atty. Gen., was on brief, for appellant.

Julius Soble, Boston, Mass., with whom Richard W. Leonard, Nashua, N. H., was on brief, for Fred J. Martineau, appellee.

Leo Patrick McGowan, Providence, R. I., with whom John P. Bourcier, Providence, R. I., and Richard W. Leonard, Nashua, N. H., were on brief, for Russell Nelson, appellee.

Before ALDRICH, Chief Judge, J. WARREN MADDEN, Senior Judge of the United States Court of Claims,* and JULIAN, District Judge.

OPINION

MADDEN, Judge:

The United States District Court for New Hampshire has granted the appellees' petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The warden who has the appellees in custody has brought this appeal. We conclude that the writ should not have been granted, and we reverse the judgment of the district court.

The appellees were tried and, on November 9, 1959, were convicted in the State court of New Hampshire of the crime of murder, and were sentenced to death by hanging. On November 30, 1961, their convictions were affirmed by the Supreme Court of New Hampshire. State v. Nelson, 103 N.H. 478, 175 A.2d 814, cert. den. 369 U.S. 879, 881, 82 S.Ct. 1153, 8 L.Ed.2d 282, May 14, 1962. On August 22, 1962, they filed in the United States District Court for New Hampshire petitions for writs of habeas corpus. On October 22, 1962, these petitions were denied for failure to exhaust state remedies.1 On October 28, 1962, the appellees moved, in the State trial court, for a new trial. The motion was denied. They appealed to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire from the denial. That court, in State v. Nelson, 105 N.H. 184, 196 A.2d 52, rejected the appeals on December 20, 1963. The Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari, 377 U.S. 1001, 84 S.Ct. 1936, 12 L.Ed.2d 1050, on June 22, 1964.

On October 7, 1964, the petition for the writ of habeas corpus, here involved, was filed in the United States District Court for New Hampshire. The writ was granted on March 1, 1965. The warden's appeal to this court was timely.

The district court granted the writ because, it concluded, the appellees' federal constitutional rights had been violated in the following regards: the admission in evidence in the State court murder trial of evidence of blood and other foreign matter on the clothing of each of the appellees, and, as to the appellee Nelson, the admission in evidence of certain incriminatory statements made by him.

On February 9, 1959, at 12:51 a. m. the appellee Nelson, a resident of Rhode Island, was picked up for questioning by the New Hampshire police in downtown Nashua, New Hampshire. The circumstances of his being there were sufficiently suspicious to justify his detention under an applicable New Hampshire statute. The police booked him for "questioning" and held him in jail.

At 3:50 a. m. on the same date the appellee Martineau, also a resident of Rhode Island, and in Nashua under suspicious circumstances, was detained by the police and similarly booked and jailed. The circumstances giving rise to the suspicions which caused the appellee's detention are related in the decisions of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire hereinabove cited.

At noon on February 9, the appellees still being in custody, the body of a man who had apparently been murdered was found in a parked automobile not far from the places where the appellees had been picked up by the police.

At 2 p. m. on the same day appellee Nelson was questioned by the police, was asked to surrender his clothing for examination by the police, and did so without manifest objection. At 4 p. m. on that day the same thing occurred with regard to Martineau's clothing.

Laboratory examination disclosed that there was blood on the appellees' clothing and also particles of materials from the floormats of the murdered man's automobile and from his plastics factory in Rhode Island.

The appellees were indicted for the murder, and the evidence obtained from their clothing, and other evidence, was introduced against them. They were convicted and sentenced, as we have stated.

Federal district courts have only such jurisdiction as Congress, by statute, has conferred upon them. This statement is as valid with regard to the district courts' jurisdiction to grant petitions for writs of habeas corpus as it is with regard to any other action which a district court is requested to take. Our text, then, must be the federal statute conferring habeas corpus jurisdiction upon the courts. Section 2241 of Title 28 of the United States Code is the pertinent provision. It says:

* * * * * *
(c) The writ of habeas corpus shall not extend to a prisoner unless —
* * * * * *
(3) He is in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.

We think the United States District Court allowed itself to be diverted from the only question properly before it, viz., the constitutionality under the United States Constitution of what the courts and the police of New Hampshire had done with regard to these appellees. The district court's opinion contains many references to the New Hampshire statutes. We quote the statutes in a footnote.2 But we think they are irrelevant. Whether these New Hampshire statutes, as interpreted either expressly or sub silentio by the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, were interpreted and applied as the United States District Court would have interpreted and applied them, if that had been its task, is none of the business of a United States court. For example, if the New Hampshire courts choose to regard what is put down or not put down on the books at the police stations as unimportant; if they choose to consider that, if one is already in custody and facts are learned by the police which would justify his arrest for murder, the fact that he is in jail and should be kept there makes it unimportant whether there is a changed entry on the books or not — these are not matters of federal law.

When at 2 p. m. Nelson and at 4 p. m. Martineau were asked to surrender their clothes, they were in custody; the police had and since noon had had grounds on which they would have arrested them if they had been at large; if they had been arrested at large and brought to the police station the police could have taken their clothes for testing3, because the murder, no matter who committed it, had been a bloody affair. Whether the clothes were surrendered voluntarily or not is unimportant. We conclude that the clothes evidence, obtained by lawful search of arrested persons, was admissible, unless a contrary conclusion is compelled by a circumstance which we now discuss.

To state the problem bluntly, it is urged on behalf of the appellees that all evidence obtained from each of them after the four hours of detention for questioning authorized by the New Hampshire statute was obtained in violation of the Constitution of the United States and was therefore inadmissible. As we have explained, the statutory four hour provision cannot be a constitutional standard. The several states have various statutory times set for questioning, or for taking an arrested person before a magistrate. If a specified length of time is too long to be federally constitutional, it cannot make any difference whether the delay occurred in New Hampshire, where the state statute was violated, or in another state where it was not. In each state the State courts are, of course, free to attach whatever effects they choose to violations of statutes of this kind. But they are not free to attribute such judgments to the requirements of the Constitution of the United States unless an equivalent judgment would be constitutionally compelled in every other state on the same set of facts, no matter what periods were set by the State statute.

The Supreme Court of New Hampshire did not discuss the problem we are now discussing, which is, whether Nelson and Martineau, from the times when they were picked up by the police at 12:51 a. m. and 3:50 a. m. respectively until good cause for their arrest for murder was disclosed at noon, which periods of detention considerably exceeded the four-hour period set by the New Hampshire statute, were unconstitutionally detained during the intervening excess period. We recognize that during that excess period the police had no valid reason for holding them. Was it a violation of the United States Constitution for New Hampshire to so hold these appellees?

We have it on the highest authority that it was not a violation of the Constitution. In McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 63 S.Ct. 608, 87 L.Ed. 819 (1943), the Supreme Court reversed a conviction because the accused was not taken promptly before a magistrate, as the federal statute required, and during the period of unlawful delay confessed the crime, and the confession was used against him in his trial. The Supreme Court, in McNabb, expressly disclaimed laying down a rule of constitutional law. It based its decision upon its supervisory powers over federal court trials. In Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449, 77 S.Ct. 1356, 1 L.Ed.2d 1479 (1957), the Court based a similar reversal, not on the Constitution, but on Rule 5(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. In Crooker v. State of California, 357 U.S. 433, 78 S.Ct. 1287, 2 L.Ed.2d 1448 (1958), Mr. Justice Clark, in the opinion of the Court, stating what does not make a confession involuntary and inadmissible, said, "Neither does * * * the failure of state authorities to comply with local statutes requiring that an accused promptly be brought before a magistrate." In Fikes v. State of Alabama, 352 U.S. 191, 194, 77 S.Ct. 281, 1 L.Ed.2d 246 (1957), Chief Justice Warren, for the Court, clearly...

To continue reading

Request your trial
20 cases
  • Rice v. Wolff
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — District of Nebraska
    • 5 Julio 1974
    ...too, there is no independent source for the introduction of this evidence. This court is aware of the decision in Hancock v. Nelson, 363 F.2d 249 (C.A. 1st Cir. 1966), which held that since the illegal detention in the case before it had nothing to do with the presence of blood on the cloth......
  • United States v. Edwards 8212 88
    • United States
    • U.S. Supreme Court
    • 26 Marzo 1974
    ...380 F.2d 741 (CA10 1967); Cotton v. United States, 371 F.2d 385 (CA9 1967); Miller v. Eklund, 364 F.2d 976 (CA9 1966); Hancock v. Nelson, 363 F.2d 249 (CA1 1966); Golliher v. United States, 362 F.2d 594 (CA8 1966); Rodgers v. United States, 362 F.2d 358 nCA8), cert. denied, 385 U.S. 993, 87......
  • People v. Mallory
    • United States
    • Michigan Supreme Court
    • 7 Febrero 1985
    ...the seizure of the evidence, the existence of the evidence does not result from the unlawful detention. See, e.g., Hancock v. Nelson, 363 F.2d 249, 254 (CA 1, 1966), cert. den. 386 U.S. 984, 87 S.Ct. 1292, 18 L.Ed.2d 234 (1967), which found no error in the failure to suppress evidence of a ......
  • Breest v. Perrin
    • United States
    • U.S. District Court — District of New Hampshire
    • 22 Agosto 1980
    ...(denied for failure to exhaust state remedies); Nelson v. Hancock, 239 F.Supp. 857 (D.N.H.1965) (finding for petitioners), rev'd 363 F.2d 249 (1st Cir. 1966), cert. denied, 386 U.S. 984, 87 S.Ct. 1292, 18 L.Ed.2d 234 (1967). Petitioner Martineau was successful, however, in obtaining a chang......
  • Request a trial to view additional results

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT