Jenkins v. State

• Decision Date: 29 April 1965
• Docket Number: No. 276,276
• Citation: 238 Md. 451,209 A.2d 616
• Parties: David JENKINS v. STATE of Maryland.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 451

238 Md. 451

209 A.2d 616

David JENKINS v. STATE of Maryland.

No. 276.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

April 29, 1965.

Russell J. White and H. Lee Allers, Jr., Baltimore, for appellant.

Richard M. Pollitt, Sp. Atty., Salisbury (Thomas B. Finan, Atty. Gen. and Charles E. Moylan, Jr., State's Atty. for Baltimore City, Baltimore, and James Owen Knotts, State's Atty. for Caroline County, Denton, on the brief), for appellee.

Before HAMMOND, MARBURY, SYBERT, OPPENHEIMER, and BARNES, JJ.

HAMMOND, Judge.

On February 1, 1963, the proprietor of a small neighborhood grocery store in east Baltimore was robbed after he had been brutally and sadistically murdered behind the meat counter of his store by being hit on the head with a soft drink bottle, stabbed repeatedly with a knife and having his head and face split by a meat cleaver. Two days later the police arrested the appellant, David Jenkins; also known as David Blanden, on the street near the store. Jenkins had formerly lived across from the store and had been a customer. The police, it would seem, had probable cause to believe the appellant committed the crimes, inasmuch as the record does not indicate that the legality of his arrest was challenged below and no point is made of it on appeal. Jenkins was placed in a cell in the Eastern police station thirty minutes after he was arrested. About an hour later, at four-forty-five p. m., he was taken to a room on the second floor and questioned by Sergeant Hirsch and Lieutenant Glover in the presence of five other policemen. Jenkins was given supper at six o'clock and took fifteen to twenty minutes, according to one police witness and from twenty-five minutes to a half hour, according to another, to eat it. After supper the appellant was again questioned until about ten o'clock when, after he made significant oral admissions, he signed a typed consent to the search of his home. The police went to the home and after showing the consent to the woman with whom Jenkins was living, were admitted by her and allowed to search. About eleven-fifteen they brought back to the station house a blue jacket with the word 'Patterson' on the back, a khaki 'army-type' shirt, both with blood on them, and a hooded gray sweater, which they had found in Jenkins' room.

A route salesman had seen a man wearing a blue jacket with the word 'Patterson' on the back in the grocery store an hour or so before the murder and remembered that the customer did not have all of the twentycent price of a box of soap powder and that, as a result, it was arranged between the man and the storekeeper to leave the box on the counter until the buyer returned with the full purchase price. The box of soap powder in a brown paper bag was on the counter when the police investigated the murder. The appellant was seen later in the day of the murder by members of his family with money in his possession.

The khaki army shirt had two buttons missing from its front. A button which matched those on the shirt had been found on the floor of the grocery store under the body of the murdered grocer, which was lying face up.

When the appellant was shown the jacket, the shirt, and the sweater, he told the police he was ready to give them a statement and he did so for about an hour, beginning at eleven-twenty p. m. Before he began the statement he was told by Lieutenant Glover that what he said must be free and voluntary on his part, that no one would make him any promises or harm him in any way and that 'what you say may be used for or against you in the Criminal Court,' and the appellant said he understood what had been told him and was still willing to tell what took place in the grocery store.

In the statement Jenkins said he told another man, one Cox, who 'needed some money,' about the grocery store. The man then said he was planning to rob the store. The appellant told him to wait and went in the store and 'bought eight cents worth of some candy and bubble gum' (bubble gum was found by the police in the pocket of the blue 'Patterson' jacket). He came out and Cox told him to keep a watch while he went in the store. When appellant, soon after, went back in the store Cox and the grocer were fighting. Appellant took money from the cash register. He saw Cox with a bottle in his hand at one time and with a knife in his hand at another, and a little later he saw Cox hit the grocer in the face with a meat cleaver. Jenkins had worm the khaki shirt and the hooded gray sweater. Cox had worn the blue 'Patterson' jacket, which Jenkins had lent him. (Investigation and a lie detector test convinced the police that Cox had nothing to do with the murder or the robbery.)

Jenkins' statement was typed by Officer Cohen as Jenkins gave it. When it was finished, Jenkins read it--all of it aloud, said one police witness, enough of it aloud to show he could read and understand it, and the rest to himself, say others--made corrections, and initialled the corrections. He also initialled the beginning and the end of each page so that nothing could be added or deleted. He would not sign the statement in the customeary places (at the end of each of the three pages of the statement), as the police requested but, after a while, did sign each page on the margin. The witnesses were sequestered and the three policemen who testified as to why Jenkins would not sign at the bottom of the pages were in substantial, although not identical, accord.

Lieutenant Glover testified Jenkins said: 'I will wait until I sign it' and said nothing about an attorney. Glover's words, in part as to this, were: 'He said he wouldn't sign but he did, on his own, sign the margin.'

Officer Cohen, who typed the confession, said that when Jenkins was asked to sign at the bottom of the pages, he said he 'didn't want to sign at that time.' He said nothing about an attorney, 'he just said he wanted to wait.' He said Jenkins signed the margins of his own accord.

Sergeant Hirsch's recollection was that when he was asked to sign the confession Jenkins said he would wait before he signed it--that he 'thought he should wait until he got an attorney.' He did not ask for an attorney or seek the services of an attorney then or later, although he was given an opportunity to do so several times on succeeding days. The only request he made was that a Catholic priest be brought to him, and this was done. Hirsch's belief was that Jenkins was willing to certify as true what he had told police by signing on the margins, but that he was not willing to formalize his statements as a 'confession' by signing it at the end.

Jenkins was granted a change of venue and was tried in Denton before Chief Judge Carter and Judges Keating and Rasin and a jury. The jury found him guilty of first degree murder, without qualifying its verdict, and guilty of robbery. The sentences were death for murder and twenty years for robbery. The judges would not admit Jenkins' confession in written form because of his refusal to sign it in a customary fashion, but did permit Officer Cohen, who had transcribed it, to use the writing to refresh his recollection as to what Jenkins had said and to relate his statements and answers to the jury for their ultimate determination as to their validity and effect, under appropriate instructions.

On appeal Jenkins makes three contentions: first, the confession was improperly admitted; second, the search of his home and the seizure of his clothing was illegal; and third, the State did not meet the burden of showing him to have been sane at the time of the commission of the crime and at the time of trial.

Appellant does not claim that the police officers were not truthful or accurate when they testified that no force, duress or threats were used to obtain the confession or when they said that no specific promises of immunity were made to induce him to confess. Rather, he relies on the claims that because he had an I. Q. of but 67 and mild organic brain damage, can be easily led, has poor ability to read and spell (in the opinion of one psychiatrists), and was questioned for some nine hours by seven policemen, 'the confession was not the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice * * *' and 'the totality of circumstances did not evidence an understandable admission of incriminating evidence.'

There are a number of facts which together explain why the three judges and then the jury reasonably could have concluded, as the judges actually, and the jury in all probability, did, that Jenkins had freely and understandingly confessed. He was twenty-four years old. The doctors who testified at the trial said that many people with an I. Q. of sixty-seven can and do lead useful lives. Jenkins had gone through the ninth grade at school and, in the opinion of the doctors, had the intellectual capacity of a sixth grade graduate. It seems unquestioned that Jenkins read aloud at least the first page of the confession and read the other pages to himself, and that he made several corrections, including the correction of a misspelled word, and initialled the changes. His capacity to resist being 'easily led' was sufficient to enable him to refuse to confess from four-forty-five p. m. to eleven-thirty p. m. and, after he had confessed, to refuse to sign the pages of the confession as he was urged to do. It would also seem beyond question that the confession was made, not so much because he was weak, but because he was confronted with his clothing taken from his house, which he knew was identified with the crimes of which he was suspected.

The questioning was not unduly long or persistent or by relays of interrogators. It was interrupted by a supper break, one hour and a quarter after it began, and by the trip to the appellant's house that began about three and one half hours after questioning resumed after the supper break, the trip occasioning a cessation of questioning until eleven-twenty, when the confession began....