People v. Knight

388 N.E.2d 414, 75 Ill. 2d 291, 26 Ill. Dec. 699, 1979 Ill. LEXIS 271
CourtIllinois Supreme Court
DecidedApril 3, 1979
Docket50766
StatusPublished
Cited by22 cases

This text of 388 N.E.2d 414 (People v. Knight) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Illinois Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
People v. Knight, 388 N.E.2d 414, 75 Ill. 2d 291, 26 Ill. Dec. 699, 1979 Ill. LEXIS 271 (Ill. 1979).

Opinion

MR. JUSTICE UNDERWOOD

delivered the opinion of the court:

In November 1975, the circuit court of Cook County sentenced the defendant, Jeffery F. Knight, to 5 years’ probation following his plea of guilty to burglary and theft. In December 1976, the court, exercising its continuing jurisdiction over defendant, held a probation revocation hearing, found that defendant had violated his probation by committing a burglary in January of that year and sentenced him to 2 to 6 years in the penitentiary. Defendant’s earlier motions to suppress an allegedly involuntary statement and evidence improperly seized had been denied on the ground that motions to suppress were inappropriate at a revocation hearing. The appellate court reversed and remanded, holding that defendant should have been granted an evidentiary hearing on his motion to suppress. (58 Ill. App. 3d 651.) We granted the State leave to appeal.

Defendant’s motion to suppress statements alleged that, after his arrest in February 1976, police had interrogated him without giving him the Miranda warnings. The motion further alleged that the statements were involuntary because police had obtained them through “psychological and mental coercion” and that police had knowingly “confront [ed] the accused with certain material misrepresentations of fact.” His motion to suppress physical evidence consisting of a television set alleged that the evidence was seized as a direct result of defendant’s illegally obtained confession and that police obtained the evidence from defendant’s home “by harassing his wife and threatening to search his home without a warrant, and attempting to coerce consent to search, and performing the search without consent.”

Those motions were denied by the trial judge based upon his belief that “you are not entitled to have motions to suppress anything” at hearings on petitions to revoke probation. When counsel pointed out that allegedly police harassment had accompanied the seizure of the evidence sought to be suppressed, the court indicated that counsel could introduce testimony of harassment during the hearing on the issue of the credibility of the witnesses.

At the revocation hearing Officer Robert Specht testified for the State that while driving home in his own car at 3 a.m. on January 31, 1976, he saw defendant and Jose Ramos, both previously known to him, standing in front of the dry-cleaning establishment which was burglarized. He parked and observed them for 45 minutes, during which time they would hide when a patrol car passed and then re-emerge. Specht left when they walked away from the premises. When Specht next returned to work on February 2, he learned that the cleaners’ had been burglarized on the night of January 30-31.

Specht testified he saw defendant and Ramos on February 4 in the lockup on an unrelated charge. He and his partner, Officer Terrence Hart, spoke with Ramos, who confessed to burglarizing the cleaners’ with defendant and said they had stored the proceeds, a television set, at defendant’s apartment. The two officers then talked with defendant’s wife, who was also at the station, and asked her to surrender the television set, telling her that they could obtain a search warrant if she did not consent. Defendant’s wife agreed to cooperate and the officers accompanied her to her apartment, where she gave them the television set introduced into evidence. Specht further testified that, after returning to the station house, he gave defendant the Miranda warnings and asked him about the burglary. Defendant initially denied culpability, but, when confronted with the television set, he confessed that he had broken the glass door of the cleaners ’ with a lead pipe and stood guard while Ramos stole the television set, which the men took to defendant’s apartment.

The owner of the dry-cleaning establishment identified the television set in question as the one stolen in the burglary.

Naomi Knight, defendant’s wife, testified for the defense that on February 4, at the 14th district station house, Officer Specht threatened to arrest her for burglary if she did not surrender the television set and told her that defendant had given police permission to get the set. Officer Hart then grabbed her by the arm and pushed her out the door, ordering her to go with them and give them the set. When Mrs. Knight asked the officers to get a warrant, they said they did not want to go to all that trouble, and they refused to let her speak to defendant before leaving. At her apartment, Hart pushed her inside and told her to get the television. When he entered the apartment she told him to take the set and leave. Mrs. Knight stated that Ramos had brought the television to her apartment a few days earlier and told her that it was not stolen.

Defendant testified that in the early morning hours of January 31 he and Ramos had stood in front of the cleaners’ waiting for a bus, and that they left when the bus arrived. He observed Specht, with whom he was acquainted, sitting in his car. The next day Ramos brought a television set to defendant’s apartment and asked permission to leave it there, denying that it was stolen. On February 4 defendant talked to Specht at the station house and Specht told him that he, his wife and Ramos would be charged with burglary; defendant, however, made no statement to Specht implicating himself.

Defendant urges here that the revocation of his probation must be reversed outright because the State did not prove that he was on probation at the time of the January 31 burglary, although that fact was not denied. The State’s petition to revoke alleged that defendant had been placed on 5 years’ probation on November 6, 1975, by the same judge presiding at the revocation hearing. The judge’s comments during sentencing clearly indicate that he remembered placing defendant on probation and telling defendant that he would be sentenced to 3 to 9 years’ imprisonment if he violated the conditions of his probation.

It is settled that a trial court may properly take judicial notice of matters of record in its own proceedings. (People v. Davis (1976), 65 Ill. 2d 157, 161.) Similarly, in In re Brown (1978), 71 Ill. 2d 151, this court held that when a minor defendant testified that he was 15 years old at a hearing on a motion to suppress, the court could properly consider the testimony in a subsequent adjudicatory hearing in the same case, although no evidence of defendant’s age was presented at that hearing. (71 Ill. 2d 151, 153.) We believe these holdings are controlling here. In a probation hearing, the trial court is simply exercising its continuing jurisdiction over the probationer. (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1975, ch. 38, par. 1005—6—4; People v. Hunt (1975), 29 Ill. App. 3d 416, 419; People v. Lampkins (1975), 28 Ill. App. 3d 254, 256.) This was, in effect, another hearing in the same case before the same judge, and the contention that the judge could not properly notice the fact that he had previously placed defendant on probation is without merit.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
388 N.E.2d 414, 75 Ill. 2d 291, 26 Ill. Dec. 699, 1979 Ill. LEXIS 271, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-knight-ill-1979.