Commonwealth v. Clark

279 A.2d 41, 443 Pa. 318, 1971 Pa. LEXIS 920
CourtSupreme Court of Pennsylvania
DecidedJune 28, 1971
DocketAppeal, 181
StatusPublished
Cited by12 cases

This text of 279 A.2d 41 (Commonwealth v. Clark) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Pennsylvania primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Commonwealth v. Clark, 279 A.2d 41, 443 Pa. 318, 1971 Pa. LEXIS 920 (Pa. 1971).

Opinion

Opinion by

Mr. Justice Roberts,

Charles Clark here appeals from the denial of a motion for a discharge or new trial based upon the claim that a seven year delay between indictment and conviction deprived him of his right to a speedy trial as guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. For reasons appearing below, we conclude that the record must be remanded for further proceedings on this claim.

In 1951 appellant was incarcerated in the Indiana State Reformatory, Pendleton, Indiana, serving a 10 to 25 year term of imprisonment for robbery. On October 10th of that year he approached the warden of that institution and voluntarily confessed to the commission of various crimes, including murder, in the Philadelphia area in March of 1951. These admissions were promptly transmitted to the appropriate Philadelphia authorities, and two Philadelphia police detectives soon visited the prison. Although appellant in his original statement to the warden referred to a killing on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he admitted to the detectives that he had murdered one Harry Miller.

On February 4,1952, appellant was brought to Philadelphia where he gave a signed confession, confirming his earlier admissions. An indictment was returned in due course but without notice to appellant who had by that time been returned to Indiana to serve the balance of his prison term for robbery without so much as a preliminary hearing on the Pennsylvania murder charge.

Appellant was not again released to the custody of Pennsylvania authorities until October 14, 1958, and not finally tried on the Pennsylvania murder charge *321 until March 30, 1959. At trial he denied having killed Harry Miller and testified that his statements in 1951 and 1952 to the Indiana warden and to the Philadelphia detectives were with one exception all fabrications designed to secure his transfer away from a cellmate who had threatened to assault him sexually. 1 This explanation was apparently not believed by the jury, and appellant was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life imprisonment.

No direct appeal was taken from this judgment of sentence, but in 1967 appellant filed a petition for relief pursuant to the Post Conviction Hearing Act 2 alleging among other things that he had been denied his right of appeal. This allegation was found to be meritorious, and appellant thereafter filed post-trial motions contending that he had been denied his right to a speedy trial, that his confession had been erroneously admitted at trial, and that the trial court had improperly restricted the cross-examination of one of the Commonwealth’s witnesses. The hearing court rejected the latter two contentions but held that an evidentiary hearing was necessary in order to resolve the speedy trial claim and ordered a new trial to enable appellant to raise that issue in a pretrial hearing.

Following the denial of its motion for reconsideration, the Commonwealth appealed the order granting a new trial to this Court on the theory that appellant had waived his right to assert his speedy trial claim by his failure to raise the issue either at trial or in his Post Conviction Hearing Act petition. We rejected this waiver argument but sustained the Common *322 wealth’s position that it was inappropriate to order a new trial merely to provide a forum for an evidentiary hearing. Accordingly, the order granting a new trial was vacated and the record remanded for further proceedings on appellant’s claim of denial of speedy trial. See Commonwealth v. Clark, 439 Pa. 192, 266 A. 2d 741 (1970).

An evidentiary hearing was held on August 25, 1970. Based upon appellant’s testimony at that hearing and upon the trial record, the hearing court concluded that the Commonwealth’s delay in bringing appellant to trial was not unreasonable under all the circumstances and that the seven year delay between indictment and trial did not in any event prejudice appellant in defending against the charge. Reasoning from these conclusions, the court held that appellant had not been deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to speedy trial and denied his motion for a discharge or new trial. The instant appeal followed.

As the United States Supreme Court has only recently held the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial enforceable against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, Klopfer v. North Carolina, 386 U.S. 213, 87 S. Ct. 988 (1967), many questions essential to the definition and implementation of the speedy trial guarantee are yet to be definitively resolved. 3 Because this is a currently emerging area of the law it is helpful to place the issues involved in this appeal in historical perspective.

Prior to Klopfer there existed a split of authority as to whether a state had an affirmative duty to seek *323 to bring to trial an accused serving a prison term in another jurisdiction. The large majority of the decided cases held that there was no such duty, and the foremost rationale advanced in support of this traditional majority view rested upon a formalistic conception of sovereignty. In short, it was assumed that the prosecution of one incarcerated in another jurisdiction could be constitutionally deferred, “since the sovereign seeking to try the prisoner did not have the power and authority over the prisoner to bring him to trial. This rule applied even if the custodial sovereign agreed to allow the other sovereign to try their prisoner.” Lawrence v. Blackwell, 298 F. Supp. 708, 712 (N.D. Ga. 1969). A “sovereign” it was argued, should not be compelled to request what need not be granted (temporary custody of the accused), thus exposing itself to the possible indignity of refusal. See, e.g., Cooper v. Texas, Tex. , , 400 S.W. 2d 890, 892 (1966); Note, Effective Guaranty of a Speedy Trial for Convicts in Other Jurisdictions, 77 Yale L. J. 767, 771 (1968). Aside from such formal concepts of power and authority, the sovereignty theory was also buttressed to a certain extent by the pragmatic consideration of historically complicated and confusing extradition procedures.

The delayed prosecution of those confined in another jurisdiction has also been justified upon the theory that such persons have fled the accusing jurisdiction, thus waiving their right to speedy trial, and on the ground that the state would have to bear substantial expenses in securing the temporary custody of the accused and transporting him to and from trial. See, e.g., Dreadfulwater v. State, 415 P. 2d 493 (Okla. Crim. App. 1966). Finally, it has been suggested that one of the real reasons for delaying prosecution of this class of defendants is convenience to the state: many an overworked prosecutor might welcome the chance to *324 postpone the trial of some cases. See Note, Detainers and the Correctional Process, 1966 Wash. U. L. Q. 417, 418-19.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
279 A.2d 41, 443 Pa. 318, 1971 Pa. LEXIS 920, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/commonwealth-v-clark-pa-1971.