State v. Sheridan

• Decision Date: 13 December 1967
• Docket Number: No. 654,654
• Citation: 248 Md. 320,236 A.2d 18
• Parties: STATE of Maryland v. Walter J. SHERIDAN.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 320

248 Md. 320

236 A.2d 18

STATE of Maryland v. Walter J. SHERIDAN.

No. 654.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

Dec. 13, 1967.

S. Leonard Rottman, Asst. Atty. Gen. (Francis B. Burch, Atty. Gen., Baltimore, and William A. Linthicum, Jr., State's Atty. for Montgomery County, Rockville, on the brief), for appellant.

Herbert J. Miller, Jr., Washington, D. C. (James T. Wharton, Rockville, and Howard Monderer, Washington, D. C., on the brief), for appellee.

Before HAMMOND, C. J., and HORNEY, MARBURY, BARNES, FINAN and SINGLEY, JJ.

HAMMOND, Chief Judge.

Walter J. Sheridan, a special correspondent and investigative reporter for a national broadcasting network, was subpoenaed to testify before the Montgomery County Grand July on November 28, 1966, in connection with suspected irregularities or unlawfulness in administrative zoning decisions which he had investigated. He refused to tell the Grand Jury the details of a conversation betwen him and one Patrick, although at least the substance of the information he had gleaned in the conversation seemingly had been disseminated to the world and although he freely told the jury that Patrick had been the source of his information. Obligingly, the Grand Jury recessed in order to afford Sheridan time and opportunity to consult a lawyer. When the jury reconvened, Sheridan again refused to divulge the contents of his conversation with Patrick. Thereupon, the jury authorized the State's Attorney to seek to require the recalcitrant to testify before them as requested. Hearing was had before Judge Moorman on the State's Attorney's petition and Sheridan's answer (which invoked Code (1965 Repl.Vol.), Art. 35, § 2, providing as follows:

'No person engaged in, connected with or employed on a newspaper or journal or for any radio or television station shall be compelled to disclose, in any legal proceeding or trial or before any committee of the legislature or elsewhere, the cource of any news or information procured or obtained by him for and published in the newspaper or disseminated by the radio or television station on and in which he is engaged, connected with or employed.'

as well as the transcript of Sheridan's testimony before the Grand Jury.

Although Judge Moorman found as a fact, entirely justifiably we think, that Sheridan 'obtained certain information in the form of a conversation with Mr. Patrick * * * (and) that he divulged the source of the conversation to the Grand Jury,' he sustained Sheridan's claim that his 'newspaperman's privilege' of never violating a confidence allowed him to remain silent as to the details of the information Patrick had given him, and dismissed the petition, somewhat inexplicably to us since the statute makes inviolate only 'the source of any news or information' and not the 'news or information' itself. ¹

The State appealed in December 1966 and, after an extension of time, the record was filed in this Court in late January 1967. On July 7 next a motion to dismiss the appeal as moot was filed, because the term of the Grand Jury before whom Sheridan was sought to be required to testify had ended. We dismissed the motion under Maryland Rule 836 c because it had not been filed within ten days after the case had become moot (Rule 835 b 7).

Sheridan renewed the motion to dismiss in his brief as Rule 836 c and the decision in Agnoli v. Powers, 235 Md. 289, 293-294, 201 A.2d 487, allow him to do.

We think the appeal must be dismissed as moot. The State's petition sought to have Sheridan compelled to give further testimony to the Grand Jury to which he had already given the source of his information. That Grand Jury's term has ended and it had been discharged. We could do nothing to undo or correct what has taken place and if we approved the lower court's action it would be an appeal in vacuo. In Ex parte Maulsby, 13 Md. 625, a prisoner who had been jailed for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury was ordered released by this Court because the jury had been discharged. The Maulsby holding was applied by the Supreme Court in Shillitani v. United States, 384 U.S. 364, 371, 86 S.Ct. 1531, 16 L.Ed.2d 622, 627, which said: 'Where the grand jury has been finally discharged, a contumacious witness can no longer be confined since he then has no further opportunity to purge himself of contempt.'

In the leading case of Loubriel v. United States (2nd Cir.), 9 F.2d 807, 809, Judge Learned Hand said for the Court:

'Nor does it make any difference that the order of committal gave him leave to purge himself before another grand jury. Each investigation is separate and independent; it terminates with the grand jury which undertakes it, and the next does...