Ward v. State of Texas

Citation86 L.Ed. 1663,316 U.S. 547,62 S.Ct. 1139
Decision Date01 June 1942
Docket NumberNo. 974,974
PartiesWARD v. STATE OF TEXAS
CourtUnited States Supreme Court

Messrs. Leon A. Ransom and William Robert Ming, Jr., both of Washington, D.C., and J. M. Burford, of Dallas, Tex., for petitioner.

Mr. Spurgeon E. Bell and Pat Coon, Jr., both of Austin, Tex., for respondent.

Mr. Justice BYRNES delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner William Ward, a negro, was indicted at the September, 1939 term of the District Court of Titus County, Texas for the murder of Levi Brown, a white man. He was placed on trial at that term but the jury was unable to agree upon a verdict. At the January, 1941 term he was again tried and found guilty of murder without malice, the jury assessing his punishment at confinement in the State penitentiary for three years. Upon appeal the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the judgment of the District Court. On the State's motion for rehearing the Court reversed itself and affirmed the judgment. Petitioner's motion for rehearing was denied, one Judge dissenting. 158 S.W.2d 516. A petition for a writ of certiorari was granted in forma pauperis. 316 U.S. 653, 62 S.Ct. 1040, 86 L.Ed. —-.

The evidence introduced at the trial was such that the jury could have drawn the following conclusions: The deceased, who was seventy-two years old, lived in Omaha, in Morris county. He had previously resided at Mount Pleasant, in the adjoining county of Titus. He went to Mt. Pleasant on Saturday, June 24, 1939. On Saturday evening he was seen for the last time, talking to petitioner and a negro woman on a street corner two and a half blocks south of where his body was found. He then moved off northward along the street followed at a little distance by petitioner and the woman. A short time later petitioner and the woman returned to the corner. They separated there and she walked off to the south while he returned in the direction in which the deceased had gone. The body was discovered on Sunday morning lying in a field in grass about knee high. There were no signs of a struggle and no evidence of robbery. The skin on the neck was bruised and discolored, the face was swollen and the eyes distended. The front of the trousers was open and there was blood on the tail of the shirt. For some time the deceased had been afflicted with a heart ailment and under advice of his physician regularly took digitalis. He had taken a dose on Saturday before leaving his home. The examining physician, however, found that death was due to strangulation.

The Court of Criminal Appeals in its final opinion denying petitioner's motion for a rehearing (158 S.W.2d 523) concluded: 'It may be stated bluntly that no conviction could be sustained in the present case without the confession of appellant.' The details of the confession need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that in it petitioner stated that under his agreement with deceased he was to receive one dollar; that the deceased refused to pay him and cursed him and hit him; that he grabbed the deceased, choked him for nearly five minutes, and not knowing whether he was dead or alive left him on the ground.

Petitioner contends that this confession was signed by him only after he had been arrested without a warrant, taken from his home town, driven for three days from county to county, placed in a jail more than 100 miles from his home, questioned continuously, and beaten, whipped and burned by the officer to whom the confession was finally made. We granted certiorari in order to determine whether the confession was the result of such coercion and duress that its use by the State at the trial constituted a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

In its first opinion reversing the judgment of conviction the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that the methods employed in obtaining the confession violated applicable Texas statutes. It added that the reversal of the conviction was 'in keeping with the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in White v. State of Texas, 310 U.S. 530, 60 S.Ct. 1032, 84 L.Ed. 1342,' in which we set aside a conviction because it was based upon a confession obtained by means repugnant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in its second opinion reinstating the judgment of conviction the Court of Criminal Appeals decided that there was a conflict of evidence with respect to the issues upon which the admissibility of the confession depended and that the question of admissibility was solely for the jury and had been submitted with proper instructions. It concluded that 'no matter what our personal belief might be, we do not feel that we have, nor do we usurp the power to set aside the finding of this jury in the case at bar.'

Each State has the right to prescribe the tests governing the admissibility of a confession. In various States there may be various tests. But when, as in this case, the question is properly raised as to whether a defendant has been denied the due process of law guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, we cannot be precluded by the verdict of a jury from determining whether the circumstances under which the confession was made were such that its admission in evidence amounts to a denial of due process.

The undisputed evidence shows that the signing of the confession was preceded by the following events. Petitioner was employed as a house servant in Mount Pleasant by Judge S. B. Caldwell, a member of the bar of Titus county. When the body of the deceased was discovered on Sunday, June 25, petitioner was taken to the court house for questioning along with several other negroes. He pleaded his innocence. During the examination he was slapped by a constable named Redfearn who gave as his reason that petitioner told him he 'didn't know what he was talking about and Quilla Gaddis was a liar.' Having no justification for holding him in custody, the county attorney at the request of Judge Caldwell let petitioner return to his home. Thereafter, on Sunday and Monday, he was questioned by officers several times and reiterated his assertions of innocence. On Tuesday the officers were still questioning several negroes in connection with their investigation of the crime. According to the county attorney they had no evidence by Tuesday night to justify the arrest of petitioner. On that night while petitioner was attending a party at his church in Mount Pleasant, he was called out, handcuffed, and taken into custody by the sheriff of Morris county, which adjoins Titus county. The sheriff was not accompanied by any officer of Titus county. He took petitioner and another negro in his car and drove them out of the city to Hart's Creek where he had arranged to meet Constable Redfearn of Titus county, the man who had slapped petitioner on Sunday. The officers then carried petitioner and two other negroes to Daingerfield in Morris county where the deceased had resided, then to Pittsburg in Camp county, and then to Gilmer in Upshur county where he spent the night in jail. On Wednesday night he was taken back to jail in Pittsburg. Constable Redfearn visited him from time to time and on Thursday morning took him to Tyler in Smith county where Redfearn placed him in the custody of two highway patrolmen, advising them of the details of the crime. About thirty minutes later the patrolmen carried petitioner to Athens, in Henderson county, and turned him over to Sheriff Sweeten. Athens is 110 miles from Mount Pleasant. During this time he had been questioned continuously. According to the county attorney of Titus county, who questioned petitioner in three different jails on three different days, petitioner stated once in Gilmer and again in Pittsburg that he would be glad to make any statement that 'I wanted him to make but that he didn't do it.' After Sheriff Sweeten had talked to petitioner, the latter signed the confession before a county attorney. Within six hours after his arrival in Athens he was returned to Tyler. Eventually he was taken back to Gilmer where he was kept until the trial.

These facts are not disputed. Petitioner's contention that he was beaten, whipped and burned by Sheriff Sweeten just before the confession was made, however, was squarely denied. All of the officers involved asserted that he had not been mistreated, with the exception of the slap by Redfearn. Sweeten's explanation of how the confession was obtained was: 'We...

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116 cases
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    ...See Lisenba v. People of State of California, 314 U.S. 219, 237--238, 62 S.Ct. 280, 290, 86 L.Ed. 166; Ward v. State of Texas, 316 U.S. 547, 550, 62 S.Ct. 1139, 1141, 86 L.Ed. 1663; Haley v. State of Ohio, 332 U.S. 596, 599, 68 S.Ct. 302, 303, 92 L.Ed. 224; Malinski v. People of State of Ne......
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    ...7 The Supreme Court's opinions in White v. Texas, 310 U.S. 530, 60 S.Ct. 1032, 84 L.Ed. 1342 (1940), and Ward v. Texas, 316 U.S. 547, 62 S.Ct. 1139, 86 L.Ed. 1663 (1942), are exemplars of this point. State officers in both cases conceded that they had taken the defendant on "night trips to ......
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    ...a confession when police questioned multiple suspects day and night for ive days. A similar holding was reached in Ward v. Texas , 316 U.S. 547 (1942), where the suspect was driven around to multiple counties and questioned for three days. While the above cases are extreme examples of almos......
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