Wiggins v. State

• Decision Date: 28 May 1964
• Docket Number: No. 326,326
• Citation: 200 A.2d 683,235 Md. 97
• Parties: Walter Nathaniel WIGGINS v. STATE of Maryland.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 97

235 Md. 97

200 A.2d 683

Walter Nathaniel WIGGINS v. STATE of Maryland.

No. 326.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

May 28, 1964.

George L. Russell, Jr., Baltimore (Richard K. Jacobsen, Baltimore, on the brief), for appellant.

Roger D. Redden, Asst. Atty. Gen. (Thomas B. Finan, Atty. Gen., William J. O'Donnell and George J. Helinski, State's Atty. and Asst. State's Atty., respectively, for Baltimore City, on the brief), all of Baltimore, for appellee.

Before BRUNE, C. J., and HENDERSON, HAMMOND, HORNEY and MARBURY, JJ.

HAMMOND, Judge.

The appellant Wiggins was convicted by two judges sitting without a jury in the Criminal Court of Baltimore of robbery with a deadly weapon and of murder in the first degree committed during a holdup of a liquor store.

In support of his effort to secure a reversal in this Court, appellant argues that the evidence was insufficient to support the trial court's denial of his motion for a judgment of acquittal at the end of the State's case and insufficient to permit the ultimate finding by the triers of fact of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Wiggins, after having been told by his conscientious, capable and experienced lawyer of his rights and privileges in the matter, said to the judges in open court that he had been advised of and knew his rights and would not himself testify either on the issue of the admissibility of his confession--which he claimed below and claims here was involuntary--or on the issue of his guilt. He further told the court, at the conclusion of the State's case, that he had freely and voluntarily decided not to call any witnesses in his behalf. It is apparent, therefore, that Wiggins' two contentions are two aspects of the same claim of the insufficiency of the State's evidence. ¹

The corpus delicti was proved by a woman clerk in the store at the time of the holdup who saw the shooting of the proprietor and by the autopsy physician. The involvement of Wiggins was established to the satisfaction beyond a reasonable doubt of the two judges who heard the case by the testimony of one Shirley Dockins, Wiggins' 'girl-friend,' who had come into the case when she complained to the police that Wiggins had threatened her with a pistol. She testified that about an hour and a half after the holdup of the liquor store Wiggins told her he thought he had killed a man, and soon after took her in a car to the store and pointed it out as 'the store where the accident happened.' The next morning Wiggins told Miss Dockins to go out and buy two newspapers and then read aloud to her the newspaper accounts of the murder--and nothing else--and told her the newspapers were wrong in suggesting that two men had been involved. Wiggins told Miss Dockins in detail of going into the store, of demanding and getting money from a young male clerk, that as he went to the rear of the store to look for more money, a man then come down some steps and poked something (later identified as a shotgun) in his back, that he turned around and the man shot the young clerk, that he hit the man hard on the head with his pistol and, fearing recognition, finally shot the man and left.

Late Sturday morning, June 23, 1962, Wiggins was questioned at 2020 Ellsworth Avenue with reference to a pistol and, after admitting pointing it a Shirley Dockins, he was booked at the Western District Police Station for investigation of assault with a pistol upon Miss Dockins. Between 9:55 p. m., June 25, 1962, and 12:10 a. m., June 26, 1962, Wiggins was interrogated by police officers at Western as to the robbery and murder. He voluntarily drew a layout of the store as he recalled it, and gave the officers a statement relative to his participation in that event, which was typed and signed. In this statement, Wiggins confessed, in detailed length substantially identical to his previous intimate revelation to Shirley Dockins, to armed robbery of the store and to the murder, the crimes for which he was convicted.

Appellant says that the Dockins testimony was vague and unreliable and, because she and Wiggins had a fight in June during which he hit her and threatened her with an iron, she had an animosity towards him which led her to fabricate her story.

The Dockins testimony was not so contradictory or inconclusive inherently as to render it without probative force if believed, and there was corroboration of some of it. The bias, reliability and credibility of the witness and the weight to be given her testimony was for the triers of fact to pass on.

Wiggins says his confession and statement to the police were inadmissible because he did not realize the consequences of saying what he said and did not make them voluntarily and of his own free will. He does not claim physical, mental or psychological coercion, or promise or inducement, but rather that he was an habitual heavy drinker who, after several days in police custody without alcohol, suffered from delirium tremens during which he had hallucinations. He relies on the fact that on June 27 the police had him committed to Crownsville State Hospital, where the diagnosis was an acute (temporary) brain syndrome induced by excessive indulgence in alcohol, and that the admission notes spoke of Wiggins having been drinking heavily for years and of seeing and hearing things. He argues also that on June 26, the day after he confessed, he told the police he had rabbits in his hands and had pulled 'angel's hair' from his body.

The witnesses in the trial were sequestered. A succession of police officers testified as to the completely voluntary nature of the confession and the statement....