Miller v. Pate
| Decision Date | 09 April 1962 |
| Docket Number | No. 13420.,13420. |
| Citation | 300 F.2d 414 |
| Parties | Lloyd Eldon MILLER, Jr., Petitioner-Appellant, v. Frank J. PATE, Respondent-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
George K. Meuth, Cuba, Ill., Donald Page Moore, Chicago, Ill., for appellant.
William G. Clark, Atty. Gen., William C. Wines, Asst. Atty. Gen., Raymond S. Sarnow, A. Zola Groves and Aubrey Kaplan, Asst. Attys. Gen., Chicago, Ill., of counsel, for appellee.
Before HASTINGS, Chief Judge, and DUFFY and SCHNACKENBERG, Circuit Judges.
Lloyd Eldon Miller, Jr., petitioner, has appealed from an order of the district court dismissing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, as amended, filed by petitioner, in which Frank J. Pate, warden of Stateville branch of the Illinois State Penitentiary, was named as respondent. From the amended petition it appears that petitioner is in the custody of respondent awaiting execution pursuant to judgment and sentence of the Circuit Court of Hancock County, Illinois. It charges that at his trial his rights under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States were violated, as more particularly hereinafter referred to.
Petitioner sets forth that he has exhausted his remedies in the courts of Illinois.
On January 11, 1956, petitioner was indicted in the Circuit Court of Fulton County, Illinois, for the murder of Janice May, aged eight years. He pleaded not guilty and the case was tried, resulting in a mistrial, and thereupon a change of venue was granted on defendant's motion to Hancock County, where a trial started on September 10, 1956. Defendant was found guilty by a jury which imposed the death penalty. A motion for a new trial was denied November 15, 1956, and judgment was imposed.
1. In its essential aspects, there is no denial on this appeal that petitioner committed the crime charged or that the evidence, aside from his confession, so proved. On the other hand, the appeal does raise the question as to whether petitioner was deprived of a fair trial because of the introduction of his confession of that crime.1
In our consideration of petitioner's contention that he confessed the crime because coercion was exerted, we find a conflict in certain respects between his testimony and that of the state's witnesses. This conflict emphasizes the importance of determining petitioner's credibility, as well as that of witnesses who contradicted him. The credibility of witnesses was for the jury to decide. They had an opportunity to observe petitioner and the others as they testified in open court. Inasmuch as it is not now contended that the state failed to prove that petitioner committed the offense for which he was tried, it is inescapable, first, that the jury believed the state's witnesses who testified to facts showing that petitioner killed the eight-year-old girl, in an act of rape, and secondly, that they did not believe petitioner's testimony in denial thereof, when he testified as a witness in his own behalf.2 Therefore, for our purpose in consideration of the contents of the entire record, we have a right to and do accept the jury's rejection of petitioner's credibility as a witness.
2. It is in view of this lack of petitioner's credibility that we now consider his testimony to support his claim of coercion. From our own examination of the abstract of the entire state trial court record submitted by petitioner to the district court, we are completely convinced that petitioner's confession was in no way a result of coercion. In this court the question of whether established primary facts underlying this confession prove that it was coerced or voluntary cannot rest on the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court. The responsibility of answering the question now rests upon us. Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 507, 73 S.Ct. 397, 97 L.Ed. 469; United States ex rel. Jennings v. Ragen, 358 U.S. 276, 277, 79 S.Ct. 321, 3 L.Ed.2d 296. However, we, for convenience, now refer to significant parts of a statement of facts relevant to the claim of coercion, as stated by the Illinois Supreme Court, People v. Miller, 13 Ill.2d 84, 148 N.E.2d 455, which we have ascertained to be accurate by our examination of the state court proceedings. Beginning at 89 the court pointed out:
Petitioner's charges that all the officials who dealt with him displayed a harsh and belligerent attitude which was manifested when they shouted at him, cursed him and uttered numerous threats, were expressly and completely denied by all who had anything to do with his custody and questioning. The Illinois Supreme Court held that in a case such as this the trial court, who had the opportunity to see and hear the witnesses, is the one most qualified to judge their credibility. That court entertained a moral certainty that petitioner knew what he was signing and that the evidence did little to establish that he capitulated through fear, hope or purported emotional upset. We have thoroughly considered the evidence in the record and agree with the foregoing results reached by the Illinois Supreme Court.
Moreover, we are impressed with the fact that the character and prior experience of petitioner indicated that he had not lived a sheltered life resulting in a sensitive, weak, shy, defenseless character. As the Illinois Supreme Court correctly found from the record, he was 29 years old, had finished the second year of high school and some training under the G.I. Bill of Rights, secured by misrepresenting that he had an honorable discharge, had met the intelligence requirements needed to enlist in the Army, Coast Guard and Air Force, had traveled extensively, and had wide and varied employment experiences. He changed his name to escape apprehension by military authorities and because he stole a car. He served a seven-months sentence on a California prison farm for "taking off" in the car, which was rented, and he was cautious enough on another occasion to find out if there were any warrants against him in Fulton County, Illinois, before he returned there. He changed jobs frequently, led a nomadic existence and entered into four hasty marriages.
Petitioner was not a weakling who would be expected to readily succumb to pressure. The crime which he had just committed showed a ruthlessness4 that belied the slightest tendency to submit to coercion, if any had been exerted. Stein v. New York, 346 U.S. 156, 185, 73 S.Ct. 1077, 97 L.Ed. 1522.
3. Petitioner contends that the most important constitutional issue relates to his offer of the testimony of a psychiatrist "to provide evidence concerning Petitioner's `power of resistance' to the pressures of police interrogation which were exerted upon him during the course of his incommunicado detention prior to his confession".
Petitioner also contends that "either psychiatric evidence of Petitioners `power of resistance' was relevant to Petitioner's Fourteenth Amendment claim of coercion, or it was not." He also insists that his due process rights were violated because the trial judge refused to hear competent testimony by an examining psychiatrist. We believe that the real question confronting us is, was Dr. Donald Sweezey, the tendered psychiatrist, competent to express an opinion on the precise question which was to be put to him by defense counsel. Actually, that question would have called for an answer to an ultimate question of fact which it was the exclusive province of the trier of facts to give, as we shall now point out.
On the trial, petitioner's counsel made two offers of proof, both out of the presence of the jury.5
In the first offer he stated:
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