Commonwealth v. Jordan

301 A.2d 667, 451 Pa. 275, 1973 Pa. LEXIS 528

• Court: Supreme Court of Pennsylvania
• Decided: March 16, 1973
• Docket: Appeal, 412
• Status: Published

Opinions

Opinion by

Mr. Justice Pomeroy,

The sole question on this appeal is the adequacy of the warnings relative to his right to counsel, given to appellant on three separate occasions prior to his oral and written confessions.¹ He was advised that he could consult a lawyer of his choice before interrogation, and that the lawyer could be present during interrogation. He was then told, “If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer and you want one, we will see that you have a lawyer provided to you before we ask you any questions”. Appellant replied affirmatively as to his understanding of the right to counsel. On the first giving of the Miranda warnings (prior to submitting to a polygraph test) he stated that he had done nothing wrong and did not need a lawyer; on the second giving of the warnings (prior to questioning five days later) his response was, “No, I will do my own talking”.

Appellant now argues that the warnings did not explicitly inform him that he was entitled to free counsel if he was indigent. The identical argument with respect to the identical warning was recently considered and rejected by this court in Commonwealth v. Ponton, 450 Pa. 40, 43-47, 299 A. 2d 634 (1972).² What we said there is equally applicable here, and is dispositive of this case: “Where . . . the explanation used by the police very clearly expresses the Miranda warning and the accused responsively acknowledges his understanding of this explanation, we can detect no deviation from the holding or the intent of the Miranda decision. While there may occur cases where a warning, adequate on its face, is in fact not understood, or where a seemingly adequate warning is not in fact genuine, this is not such a case. . . . Since here the appellant unquestionably did have awareness of his right to free counsel, we hold that his present challenge to the warning as given is without merit”.

Appellant was thirty-two years of age at the time of his arrest; he had completed high school through the eleventh grade; his acknowledgments that he understood his right to be provided with counsel if he could not afford one were unequivocal. We conclude that the court below was correct in finding that the confession was voluntary and should not be suppressed.

Judgment of sentence affirmed.

Mr. Justice Nix took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.

I.

1 The confessions were to a robbery and the killing, in the course of it, of one Marshall Newmark. A jury convicted appellant of murder in the second degree. He was sentenced to an imprisonment of ten to twenty years.

2 The opinion in Commonwealth v. Ponton was filed on November 17, 1972, the same date as the argument in the case at bar. As we noted in Ponton (footnote 2), the challenged warning, at one time part of the standard card used by the Philadelphia police at the direction of the District Attorney’s office, has since been modified to include the phrase “free of charge”.