Jacobs v. Warden, Maryland Penitentiary
| Decision Date | 07 October 1966 |
| Docket Number | No. 9564.,9564. |
| Citation | 367 F.2d 321 |
| Parties | Nathaniel J. JACOBS, Appellant, v. WARDEN, MARYLAND PENITENTIARY, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
John H. Ditto, Jr., Baltimore, Md. (Court-assigned counsel), for appellant.
R. Randolph Victor, Asst. Atty. Gen. of Maryland (Thomas B. Finan, Atty. Gen. of Maryland, on the brief), for appellee.
Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, and BRYAN and J. SPENCER BELL, Circuit Judges.
Convicted on a plea of guilty to a charge of armed robbery in a state court, this Maryland prisoner seeks habeas corpus relief upon the ground that his plea was involuntary. The contention depends in large part upon a finding of involuntariness in the confession of a co-defendant which supplied the cause for the arrest, without a warrant, of this appellant, which in turn, it is said, led to his almost spontaneous confession. We affirm the denial of relief.
Jacobs, an employee of a department store, had been filching clothing. Allegedly, he expanded his operation by masterminding an armed robbery. The store was robbed by three men. When one of them, Kelly, was arrested, he signed a confession which implicated Jacobs as the ringleader. Armed with this information, police officers went to the store and arrested Jacobs. In the presence of the store manager, he did not deny the charge, and, within twenty-five minutes of his arrival at the police station, he admitted his guilt. A few minutes later, he signed a written confession. Later, all participants initialed a joint confession.
Kelly had been arrested without a warrant on the basis of information received from two informants. The police had not recorded the information they had received and, at the time of the hearing, could not identify the informants beyond general references to their sex. The officers could not vouch for the reliability of those informants.
On that account, the District Court held that there was no probable cause for Kelly's arrest and that his subsequent confession was the involuntary product of the illegal arrest, though otherwise uncoerced.1
Jacobs contends that, since Kelly's confession has been held involuntary as the technical product of his illegal arrest, it could not furnish probable cause for a belief that Jacobs was a participant in the crime which the officer knew had been committed. He concludes that his arrest must also have been unlawful and his confession the product of the unlawful arrest.
The contention draws the thread too fine. The connection between Kelly's illegal arrest and his confession is sufficiently close that the latter may be said to be dependent upon the former. The connection between Kelly's illegal arrest and Jacobs' confession is far more attenuated. The fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine need not be extended to its seedlings.2
The District Court found, with abundant justification that Kelly's confession was truthful and trustworthy. Its invalidation as a basis for Kelly's conviction, because of the technical defect in Kelly's arrest, was not found to have infected its apparent reliability. At the time the policemen moved to effect the arrest of Jacobs, they had every reason to believe that Kelly's confession in its implication of Jacobs was reliable information. Its subsequent suppression as support for Kelly's conviction because of uncertainty of the sources of information which led to Kelly's arrest cannot gainsay its reliability, apparent at the time to the officers, which all subsequent events have confirmed. An arrest of one of multiple offenders upon improbable cause, or upon cause which years after the event cannot be documented, may invoke rules of exclusion for the protection of the victim of the illegal arrest, but it does not deprive the victim's statement of the inherent and apparent reliability it convincingly and undeniably bore then and now.3
There is no greater merit in the alternative contention that the confession was the tainted product of Kelly's.
The victim of an unlawful seizure may be able to object successfully to the use of his confession, when the confession is the direct result of confrontation with the fruits of the seizure.4 Similarly, the...
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People v. Johnson
...back to the earlier invasion of the premises occupied by an entirely different individual. As the court said in Jacobs v. Warden (4th Cir. 1966) 367 F.2d 321, 323, 'The fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine need not be extended to its If that break in the causal chain is not adequate, though......
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Outing v. State of North Carolina, 10926.
...Court has not as yet found it necessary to reach the question of the applicability of Wong Sun to state trials. See Jacobs v. Warden, 367 F.2d 321, 323 n. 2 (4th Cir. 1966); Ralph v. Pepersack, 335 F.2d 128, 136 & n. 11 (4th Cir. 1964). Nor need that question be reached in the instant case.......
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Blackburn v. Copinger
...supra at 711, n. 7 of 386 U.S., 87 S.Ct. 1338; United States v. Schwartz, 372 F.2d 678, 682 (4th Cir. 1967); Jacobs v. Warden, 367 F.2d 321, 323 and n. 2 (4th Cir. 1966); Ralph v. Pepersack, 335 F.2d 128, 136, n. 11 (4th Cir. 1964), cert. denied, 380 U.S. 925, 85 S.Ct. 907, 13 L.Ed.2d 811 (......
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United States v. Williams
...482 F.2d 1293, 1297-99 (5th Cir.1973); United States v. Brown, 425 F.2d 1172, 1174 (9th Cir.1970) (per curiam); Jacobs v. Warden, 367 F.2d 321 (4th Cir.1966); United States v. Agapito, 477 F.Supp. 706, 713 (S.D.N.Y.1979) aff'd, 620 F.2d 324 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 834, 101 S.Ct. 1......