United States v. Denno

• Decision Date: 24 November 1953
• Docket Number: No. 54,Docket 22789.,54
• Citation: 208 F.2d 605
• Parties: UNITED STATES ex rel. LEYRA v. DENNO.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit

208 F.2d 605 (1953)

UNITED STATES ex rel. LEYRA v. DENNO.

No. 54, Docket 22789.

United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.

Argued October 5, 1953.

Decided November 24, 1953.

Writ of Certiorari Granted March 15, 1954.

Osmond K. Fraenkel, New York City (Frederick W. Scholem, New York City, on the brief), for petitioner-appellant.

William I. Siegel, Asst. Dist. Atty., Kings County, N. Y., Brooklyn, N. Y. (Nathaniel L. Goldstein, Atty. Gen., State of New York, and Miles F. McDonald, Dist. Atty., Kings County, N. Y., Brooklyn, N. Y., on the brief), for respondent-appellee.

Before CHASE, Chief Judge, and CLARK and FRANK, Circuit Judges.

Writ of Certiorari Granted March 15, 1954. See 74 S.Ct. 533.

CLARK, Circuit Judge.

This appeal is by Camilo Weston Leyra from the denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus wherein he asserted a violation of constitutional due process in his trial and conviction for murder and sentence to death in the courts of the State of New York. His first trial and conviction, for murder of his parents, resulted in a reversal by a unanimous Court of Appeals of New York for improper admission of a confession. People v. Leyra, 302 N.Y. 353, 98 N.E.2d 553. A second conviction, for his father's murder,¹ was affirmed by a majority of the Court of Appeals, People v. Leyra, 304 N.Y. 468, 108 N.E.2d 673; a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States was denied, Leyra v. New York, 345 U.S. 918, 73 S.Ct. 730, and thereafter an application for a rehearing was denied, 345 U.S. 946, 73 S.Ct. 835. Thereupon he brought a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the district court, which Judge Ryan denied in a reasoned opinion reported in Leyra v. Denno, D.C.S.D.N.Y., 113 F.Supp. 556. This appeal followed.

The issue here concerns the use in the trials of confessions by petitioner to the brutal hammer murders of his elderly parents. As presented on the second appeal, after the first appeal had established the invalidity by reason of mental coercion and promises of leniency of a confession made to a Doctor Helfand, the question was whether this invalidity also permeated certain other and later confessions, which the jury considered and by their verdicts held to be freely made, to such an extent that as a matter of law they, too, must be held invalid. Since a majority of the state Court of Appeals has held that the issue as to their voluntary character was correctly submitted to the jury, the question before us is narrowly whether that ruling as to the nature and state of the evidence was so unjustified as to be a denial of due process of law requiring federal interference to protect petitioner in his constitutional rights. Whatever of anomaly there may appear to be in a bench of one or more federal judges thus reviewing a decision to which in all details an outstanding state tribunal has given the most careful and conscientious attention, there can be no doubt of our duty to do just this; indeed, it is often reiterated in Supreme Court opinions, of which the latest are Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 458, 507, 508, 73 S.Ct. 397, 437, and Stein v. New York, 346 U.S. 156, 170, 180-182, 73 S.Ct. 1077. We cannot escape the heavy responsibility involved in this review.

We therefore turn at once to the confessions which precipitated the issue. We need not deal with the details of the crime, which are sufficiently described in the state court opinions. It appears that after discovery of the bodies of the Leyras as found in their home, made in fact by petitioner, he came almost immediately under suspicion. After two days and a night of intermittent questioning in the custody of the police, and after his complaints that his sinus was bothering him, petitioner was introduced to a Dr. Max Helfand, physician and psychiatrist. Dr. Helfand was unconnected with the police department, but, unknown to petitioner, had been summoned and briefed by the District Attorney. Left alone with petitioner in a wired room, they talked for an hour and a half, while the police listened to and recorded the conversation. The statements thus elicited from petitioner were admitted at the first trial and were the basis of the reversal, where they were held to be coerced as a matter of law. They were brought into the second trial partly by petitioner in attempting to show that details of later confessions had been planted in his mind by Helfand, and the rest by the State in rebutting this contention. This testimony was properly isolated in the charge to the jury as bearing only on the voluntary nature of later confessions, and its admission is not here in issue.

At the close of the case the trial judge charged that the statements elicited by Helfand were, as a matter of law, induced by coercion, and hence not to be considered on the issue of guilt. He further charged that, as a matter of law, the statements were induced by an authorized promise of leniency and were therefore invalid. In general the two invalidating factors of mental coercion and inducement by promise were linked together in the judge's references to them, as where he told the jury "that you are bound to consider the established fact that Dr. Helfand practiced illegal coercion upon the defendant and made authorized promises of leniency to him. The presumption is that such coercion and promise of leniency continued to affect the defendant's later confessions; unless the prosecution has convinced you, beyond a reasonable doubt, from all the credible evidence in the case, that such coercion and promise of leniency did not extend over and affect the later confession made to Meenahan. Unless you are so convinced, the later confession made to Meenahan must be entirely disregarded and not considered by you as evidence of guilt." But since, as noted below, the issue has developed more specifically with respect to the effect of the promise, it is well to note exactly what appears to be the one instance where the judge did treat this, at least comparatively speaking, as a separate matter, viz.:

"I charge you, gentlemen, as a matter of law, that the so-called Helfand confession was not voluntarily made; that it was due to mental coercion practiced by the physician upon the defendant. That, in and of itself, renders it worthless as evidence of guilt. It may not be regarded by you, even in the slightest degree, as any evidence of guilt. I charge you also, as a matter of law, that this so-called Helfand confession is invalid and may not be considered by you as evidence of guilt, on the further ground that Dr. Helfand, who was then acting for the District Attorney, made a promise to the defendant in order to induce him to confess, and, thus, did induce him to confess by reason of such promise; the said promise being, in effect, that if he made such confession, he, the defendant, would not be prosecuted for the capital offense of murder in the first degree, but, possibly, for a lesser crime. Therefore, it is now clear that the Helfand confession may not, under any circumstances, be considered by the jury as evidence of guilt. The Helfand confession becomes material with regard to another problem which I shall discuss with you later."

This other problem with regard to which the confession to Dr. Helfand did become material was, as stated above, that of carry-over of the invalidating factors to affect the other confessions. This problem developed because on the first appeal the court, differentiating the accused's responses to Dr. Helfand (the so-called Helfand confession), had said that whether the coercion found implicit in the accused's statements to the doctor carried over and into the later confessions was a question of fact for the jury which there had never been properly submitted to it. People v. Leyra, supra, 302 N.Y. 353, 365, 366, 98 N.E.2d 553. So the second trial was devoted substantially to the question of the admissibility of the later confessions, the first one to Police Captain Meenahan, the next (with the police out of the room) to the accused's business associate Herrschaft, and the final one in extensive narrative to two assistant district attorneys. Not all of these stood on the same basis. The one to the police captain, directly following the activities of Dr. Helfand, was naturally the most vulnerable. The testimony of Herrschaft, to whom he said, "I did it," while not necessarily showing premeditation, was, on the other hand, the most natural; the dissenting judges did not question the jury's finding as to the voluntary character of these statements and no issue is raised as to them here. Moreover, they well might have bearing on the other confessions; thus counsel for the respondent stresses petitioner's failure to complain to Herrschaft, his associate and friend, that he had been coerced to confess to the police captain. And the later statements to the assistant district attorneys, made according to their testimony when his demeanor was normal and when he was cool and calm and told the entire story, might well be regarded as of persuasive effect.

In addition to the testimony of the various participants in or witnesses to the confessions — with the exception of the accused, who did not take the stand in the second trial — there was extensive testimony by two qualified psychiatric experts as to the possibility of a carry-over of the mental coercion and promise of leniency made by Dr. Helfand to affect the later confessions. The two experts differed pretty completely; the one for the accused gave his view that there would be such a carry-over, while the contrary conclusion was expressed by a doctor appearing for the State, who was cross-examined in great detail and at length when offered both in chief and on rebuttal. While the first questions put to these doctors were framed in terms of explicit reference to the mental coercion, yet upon direct prompting of the court they were extended to and did specifically include...