Reeves v. Warden, Maryland Penitentiary

• Decision Date: 25 February 1965
• Docket Number: No. 9435.,9435.
• Citation: 346 F.2d 915
• Parties: Charles James REEVES, Appellant, v. WARDEN, MARYLAND PENITENTIARY, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

346 F.2d 915 (1965)

Charles James REEVES, Appellant, v. WARDEN, MARYLAND PENITENTIARY, Appellee.

No. 9435.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued November 16, 1964.

Decided February 25, 1965.

Rehearing Denied July 23, 1965.

Morton P. Fisher, Jr., Baltimore, Md. (Court-assigned counsel), for appellant.

Franklin Goldstein, Asst. Atty. Gen. of Maryland (Thomas B. Finan, Atty. Gen. of Maryland, on brief), for appellee.

Before SOBELOFF, Chief Judge, and BOREMAN and J. SPENCER BELL, Circuit Judges.

J. SPENCER BELL, Circuit Judge.

The petitioner, Charles James Reeves, has appealed from the district court's denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus after a full evidentiary hearing.¹ Reeves maintains that his constitutional rights were abridged in his state court trial in several respects, but his principal contention is that a yellow note was seized by the police during an unconstitutional search and admitted in evidence against him to his prejudice.²

The basic facts in this case are extensive, but they are not in serious dispute. On the evening of July 23, 1959, at about 11:30, the prosecutrix, Miss Nancy Austin, a white single female, then nineteen years old, was raped at her apartment in Baltimore, Maryland, where she was living alone. She testified that she discovered her attacker in her apartment as she came from her bathroom to her bedroom and that he held a broken half-pint vodka bottle to her throat while he raped her three times. After about forty-five minutes she managed to escape from him, and as she ran out of her apartment and down the stairs, her assailant threw the broken bottle at her. The bottle broke into a number of smaller pieces when it missed her and struck a wall instead.

The matter was promptly reported to the Baltimore police,³ who immediately investigated the scene of the crime and questioned Miss Austin. A description by the prosecutrix of her attacker was subsequently broadcast to all police units on duty. The next day Miss Austin was shown pictures of eight Negro males, each of whom had some form of mustache. From this group she identified the petitioner as her assailant. The grouping was prepared in order to test her reaction to the petitioner's picture because Officer Ford, one of the several officers who were investigating this offense, thought that the physical description of her attacker given to the police by the prosecutrix — his race, height, weight, hair and complexion coloring, and the existence of a mustache — generally matched that of Reeves. Officer Ford was familiar with Reeves because he had arrested him in May, 1958, and charged him with the burglary of an apartment in the neighborhood where Miss Austin lived. Reeves was subsequently convicted of burglary and received a prison sentence of one year.⁴ In that proceeding the prosecutrix, also a young white woman, testified that a Negro intruder had forced his way into her apartment and had ordered her to lie on her bed and say nothing while he held a fishing knife at her throat, but there was no charge that she had been raped or otherwise physically molested.

Although Miss Austin's identification of the petitioner was made before 11:00 on the morning of July 24th, not until more than twelve hours later did the police make any effort to apprehend Reeves, and he was not arrested until about 5:45 on the morning of July 25th, more than eighteen hours after the identification. Despite this lapse of time, no arrest warrant was procured.⁵ As the several police officers who had been directed by Captain Mahrer to pick up Reeves⁶ arrived at 2527 West Fairmount Avenue, where the petitioner was living with his older sister (who owned the house), his mother, and a niece, they met the sister, Dovie Joyner, who was just returning home, and she admitted the officers to the house⁷ and directed them to the middle room where the petitioner was sleeping. Reeves was awakened by Lt. Klump and told to get dressed because the police wanted to talk with him downtown. Lt. Klump testified that no charge was made against Reeves at this time and that he was advised only that he was being taken in for investigation and interrogation. A specific question to the police by Reeves' mother asking why they wanted her son received only an unresponsive reply.⁸ At the time of the arrest, the police did not make a careful search of the premises. They did, however, take with them some of the petitioner's clothing which was lying on a chair in his room, but no evidence based upon or derived from this clothing was introduced at his trial.

Reeves was placed unhandcuffed in a police car with several officers to be taken downtown. During this trip, he allegedly made a totally unsolicited statement to the officers that "if I had known you fellows were out there, you would never have got me, I would have went over the roof top."⁹ Upon his arrival at the police station house, Reeves was booked for investigation. The arrest blotter shows that he was subsequently charged with rape and burglary in separate counts.¹⁰

On the morning of July 26th, the prosecutrix identified Reeves as her assailant a second time by picking him out of a police lineup. She later confirmed her identification upon closer examination by means of a skin rash on the right side of his face and neck which she said she had noticed at the time of the crime.

In spite of careful police work, no evidence was unearthed to tie the defendant to the crime except the prosecutrix's identifications, the yellow paper in issue here, and the statement allegedly made by the accused as he was being taken to police headquarters.¹¹ Paint scrapings, fingerprints, and palm prints from the apartment and the bottle fragments were sent to the F.B.I. laboratories along with the defendant's fingerprints and the clothes taken from his room at the time of his arrest, but all tests were negative.¹² The defendant produced seven alibi witnesses who testified that of their own knowledge they could state that Reeves was in his own neighborhood at or about the time of the crime, and he himself took the stand and denied his guilt.

The prosecutor opened the one day trial¹³ before the Criminal Court of Baltimore City, sitting without a jury, with a trenchant description of a rape so wanton and brutal that he felt it justified asking for the death penalty. In his preview of the testimony which he expected to offer, the prosecutor said:

"We also anticipate probably a great cavalcade of alibi witnesses who will be produced by the Defense but there is one other item which we want to introduce in evidence. That when the police went to the home of Charles James Reeves and picked him up, at this time he had no idea of what he was being questioned about, what he was charged with, on what day, if any offense was involved, and yet at the time they picked him up they conducted a search of his room and his bureau with his clothing which almost all of which had been freshly laundered, they found under a shirt in his bureau drawer a yellow slip of paper. A yellow slip of paper saying Thursday, Thursday was the date of this rape, and outlining the, it looks like a schedule in full detail of the whereabouts on that day, six to six-thirty, cleaning kitchen, 6:30 to 6:45 watch television, et cetera, met Paul, and with no other day but on this day and this day alone attempting to outline his movements virtually minute by minute, certainly every half hour by half hour, and on the basis of that and of course primarily upon the positive identification of the young lady, * * * we think the State will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this Defendant, Charles James Reeves is guilty of rape, a brutal, violent rape and threat to her life upon the complaining witness, the 18 year old Nancy Austin, and for those reasons when the Court hears all of the evidence we feel it will be justified both in bringing in a verdict of guilty and imposing in this case the supreme penalty, the death penalty."¹⁴

The trial court found the defendant guilty of rape, and five months and one week later, Reeves was sentenced to life imprisonment. In an informal oral opinion rendered at the conclusion of the trial proceedings, Judge Byrnes, without purporting to exhaustively summarize all the evidence in the case, commented upon some of the items which he found particularly persuasive. He referred specifically to the prosecutrix's positive identifications of the accused and to the statement by Reeves in the police car about "going over the roof."¹⁵ Although it had been offered by the state and admitted without objection, Judge Byrnes did not mention the yellow note.

A motion by Reeves for a new trial was denied on April 2, 1960, and his conviction was affirmed on appeal. Reeves v. State, 224 Md. 436, 168 A.2d 353, cert. denied, 368 U.S. 865, 82 S.Ct. 113, 7 L.Ed.2d 62 (1961). An appropriate petition for relief under the Maryland Post Conviction Procedure Act was filed on December 6, 1961, and denied on November 5, 1962. Leave to appeal from this decision was denied by the Maryland Court of Appeals on March 13, 1963. Reeves v. Warden, 231 Md. 613, 188 A.2d 698 (1963). Having thus exhausted his available state remedies for redress, Reeves filed his petition for a writ of habeas corpus with the federal court on April 3, 1963. Judge Thomsen's order denying the habeas petition was filed March 5, 1964.

We have stated earlier that the principal claim asserted in behalf of the petitioner is that he was prejudiced by the admission at his trial of an unconstitutionally seized document. The resolution of this issue involves at least three subsidiary questions: (a) Is it reasonably possible that the admission of the yellow note prejudiced the petitioner? (b) If so, under the circumstances of this case, were the police engaged in an unreasonable search when, without a search warrant, they searched the dwelling where the defendant lived and discovered the...