Smith v. State

• Decision Date: 26 February 1973
• Docket Number: No. 403,403
• Citation: 17 Md.App. 217,301 A.2d 54
• Parties: Dennis D. SMITH v. STATE of Maryland.
• Court: Court of Special Appeals of Maryland

Page 217

17 Md.App. 217

301 A.2d 54

Dennis D. SMITH v. STATE of Maryland.

No. 403.

Court of Special Appeals of Maryland.

Feb. 26, 1973.

Certiorari Denied May 15, 1973.

C. Eugene Schmidt, Towson, for appellant.

Bernard A. Raum, Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom were Francis B. Burch, Atty. Gen., Milton B. Allen, State's Atty., for Baltimore City and Joseph Lyons, Asst. State's Atty., for Baltimore City, on the brief, for appellee.

Argued before ORTH, C. J., and POWERS and SCANLAN, JJ.

ORTH, Chief Judge.

This case concerns the right to a trial by jury of a person charged with offenses under the exclusive original jurisdiction of the District Court of Maryland.

I

'Jury trial came to America with English colonists, and received strong support from them.' Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 152, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 1449, 20 L.Ed.2d 491. 'To the Englishman of the fourteenth century . . . it had already become an 'ancient prerogative' to have twelve laymen stand between him and the vengeance of the king in a criminal prosecution of any kind, whether the charge were tippling at the inn or murder.' Frankfurter & Corcoran, Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 29 Harv.L.Rev. 917 (1926) at 923 (hereinafter referred to as Frankfurter & Corcoran). ¹ Blackstone considered jury trial to be a strong barrier between liberties of the people and the prerogative of the Crown. 4 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 349. The colonists recognized trial by jury as preventing oppression by the Government, see Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 100, 90 S.Ct. 1893, 26 L.Ed.2d 446, and deeply resented royal interference with it. This resentment is apparent in resolutions adopted by the First Congress of the American Colonists (The Stamp Act Congress), declarations by the First Continental Congress, and statements in the Declaration of Independence. The constitutions adopted by the original states guaranteed jury trial. ² The Constitution of Maryland was framed 'in free and full Convention assembled' which met at Annapolis 14 August 1776 and completed its labors 11 November 1776. ³ The delegates, 'taking into (their) most serious consideration the best means of establishing a good Constitution in this State, for the sure foundation and more permanent security thereof', assented to and passed a Declaration of Rights. As to trial by jury, they declared:

'III. That the inhabitants of Maryland are entitled to the common law of England, and the trial by jury, according to the course of that law, . . .

'XIX. That, in all criminal prosecutions, every man hath a right . . . to a speedy trial by an impartial jury, without whose unanimous consent he ought not to be found guilty.

'XXI. That no freeman ought to be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.'

The declarations with respect to jury trial remained intact as Articles 3, 19 and 21 in the Declaration of Rights of the Constitution of Maryland of 1851. ⁴ In the Declaration of Rights of the Constitution of 1867, still in effect the jury trial provisions were designated respectively as Articles 5, 21 and 23. ⁵

The concern for the right to jury trial was also evident with respect to the federal government of the new United States of America as proposed after separation of the clonies. The Constitution of the United States, 'Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present ⁶ the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord on thousand seven hundred and Eighty-seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth', provided in Article III, Section 2: 'The Trial of All Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by jury; . . .' ⁷ The first ten amendments to the Constitution were proposed by Congress on 25 September 1789, and declared ratified on 15 December 1791. Article VI of the amendments guaranteed that 'In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed . . .' ⁸

It has been the constant course of litigation in England, for centuries past, to confer summary jurisdiction upon justices of the peace for the trial and conviction of parties for minor and statutory police offenses. State v. Glenn, 54 Md. 572, 600. Blackstone found that criminal proceedings were divisible into two kinds: summary and regular. 'By a summary proceeding I mean principally such as is directed by several Acts of Parliament (for the common law is a stranger to it, unless in the case of contempts) for the conviction of offenders, and the inflicting of certain penalties created by those Acts of Parliament. In these there is no intervention of a jury, but the party accused is acquitted or condemned by the suffrage of such person only as the statute has appointed for his judge. An institution designed professedly for the greater ease of the subject, by doing him speedy justice, and by not harassing the freeholders with frequent and troublesome attendances to try every minute offence.' 4 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 280-281. ⁹ Thus it was that a great number of offenses were disposed of in justices' courts by summary trials, prompted by a constant effort to adjust the machinery of jury trial with the volumes of litigation which came before the Sessions. There was no unifying consideration as to the type of criminal offense subjected to summary trial, although the great majority of instances were aptly characterized as 'petty' violations. See Frankfurter & Corcoran, 922-934. The colonists in America, facing problems comparable to those experienced by England, and having brought with them legal traditions of which summary jurisdiction by justices of the peace was a familiar part, 'resorted to summary jurisdiction for minor offenses with full loyalty to their conception of the Englishman's right to trial by jury.' Id., at 936. In Frankfurter and Corcoran the printed record of seven of the colonies, of which Maryland was one, was examined to ascertain evidence as to their use of summary procedure. The record showed that those colonies 'acted on the conviction that the much-cherished jury procedure was not imperative for small offenses', and that 'the practice of summary procedure, pursued in varying measure by the different colonies, persisted unchallenged through the acrimonious controversy with the Crown over the denial of the jury in admiralty courts, through the framing of the jury clauses in state constitutions, and through the enactment of the jury clauses in the Federal Constitution.' Id., at 937. ¹⁰

Our Court of Appeals recognized that not every criminal prosecution is within the ambit of the provisions of the Constitution of Maryland relating to trial by jury. Maryland Constitutional Law, Niles, 42-44 (1915). It has held that various acts providing summary proceedings for certain offenses to be constitutional. In State v. Glenn, supra, the court, after tracing the course of English justice, noted, 54 Md. at 602: 'The exercise of the summary jurisdiction, therefore, is not, in England at least, regarded as being in violation of the fundamental guarantees of the rights and liberties of the people; and the personal liberty of the subject at this day is as well and jealously protected in England as in any other country, where the principles of Magna Charta and of the common law are enforced.' It observed: 'With us there has been no time since the earliest days of the colony that the summary jurisdiction by justices of the peace has not been exercised, in one form or another, over parties offending against the peace and good order of society. This jurisdiction has been exercised, sometimes under British statutes in force here, but more generally under statutes passed by the Colonial and State Legislatures.' Ibid. It stated: 'The framers of all our Constitutions were well acquainted with the history of legislation in regard to the exercise of summary jurisdiction, both in England and in this State, and of the needs of society for summary protection against the vicious, idle, vagrant and disorderly portion of its members; and it is difficult to suppose that, by any provision incorporated in those instruments, it was intended to nullify previous legislation, altogether interdict the use of a long and well-established summary jurisdiction for the protection of society, and thus radically change and seriously impair the whole police system of the State.' Id., 54 Md. at 604-605. It construed the constitutional jury trial provisions, 54 Md. at 605-606: 'The meaning of the provisions of the Declaration of Rights would seem to be plain. . . . (W)hen it is declared that the party is entitled to a speedy trial by an impartial jury, that must be understood as referring to such crimes and accusations as have, by the regular course of the law and the established modes of procedure, as theretofore practiced, been the subjects of jury trial. It could never have been intended to embrace every species of accusation involving either criminal or penal consequences. . . . The design, manifestly, of the provisions of the Declaration of Rights to which we have referred, was simply to declare and make firm the preexisting rights of the people, as those rights had been established by usage and the settled course of law.' Glenn was quoted and followed in Danner v. State, 89 Md. 220, 42 A. 965, which then discussed the types of offenses which commanded a jury trial and those which did not. 'The right to demand a jury trial, being as we have thus seen guarantied only to 'such crimes and accusations as have, by the regular course of the law and established mode of procedure as theretofore practiced, it...