State ex rel. Wyatt v. Henderson

453 S.W.2d 434, 2 Tenn. Crim. App. 288, 1969 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 362
CourtCourt of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee
DecidedDecember 5, 1969
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 453 S.W.2d 434 (State ex rel. Wyatt v. Henderson) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State ex rel. Wyatt v. Henderson, 453 S.W.2d 434, 2 Tenn. Crim. App. 288, 1969 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 362 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1969).

Opinion

OPINION

OLIVER, Judge.

Grady Wyatt, the petitioner below, indigent and represented there and here by court-appointed counsel, an inmate of the State Penitentiary where he is serving two concurrent and one consecutive 99-year rape sentences, appeals to this Court from the judgment of the Criminal Court of Hamilton County dismissing his petition for the writ of habeas corpus after an evidentiary hearing. The court treated the petition as one filed under the Post-Conviction Procedure Act. (T.C.A. §§ 40-3801 — 40-3824).

[290]*290Called as the petitioner’s first witness, the Hamilton County Criminal Court Clerk introduced, at the instance of the petitioner’s counsel, copies of the Minutes of Division No. 1 and Division No. 2 of the Criminal Court of Hamilton County, from which it appears that (1) on June 24, 1943, upon a plea of not guilty, the petitioner was convicted of rape in Division No. 1 of the Hamilton County Criminal Court and was sentenced to imprisonment for 99 years in the State Penitentiary; (2) on July 9, 1943 the petitioner’s motion for a new trial was withdrawn and his sentence was ordered into execution; (3) on July 9, 1943 in Division No. 2 of the Hamilton County Criminal Court, upon his pleas of guilty, the petitioner was convicted of rape in two separate cases in each of which he was sentenced to imprisonment in the State Penitentiary for 99 years, the court ordering one sentence to run concurrently with the earlier sentence adjudged in Division No. 1 and the other to be served consecutively thereto.

The Criminal Court Clerk also testified that Honorable Frank S. Darwin and Honorable L. D. Miller, the judges of the First and Second Divisions, respectively, of the Criminal Court of Hamilton County at that time, and the Honorable Peabody Howard who was the District Attorney General, are all deceased, facts of which this Court has judicial knowledge.

In his petition, the petitioner attacks his convictions upon the grounds that (1) he was denied his right of appeal, (2) Negroes were systematically excluded from the Grand Juries which indicted him and from the petit juries which tried him, and (3) the State introduced no evidence in his second and third rape trials wherein he [291]*291entered pleas of guilty. By appropriate Assignments of Error, he advances the same contentions here.

Petitioner’s insistence that he was denied his right of appeal relates to his first rape conviction, and is predicated upon the proposition that in all three of those cases he was represented by court-appointed counsel who persuaded him against his will to withdraw his appeal in the first case and over-persuaded him to plead guilty in the other two cases; and that he, therefore, was denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel. The petitioner says in his petition that he never knew the name of his attorney appointed by the court. At the hearing he alone testified that his trial attorney was court-appointed, and said that he does not know who he was. That is not enough to establish that his trial counsel was court-appointed.

The burden of proving this allegation was on the petitioner. State ex rel. Kuntz v. Bomar, 214 Tenn. 500, 381 S.W.2d 290; State ex rel. George v. Bomar, 216 Tenn. 82, 390 S.W.2d 232; State ex rel. Lawrence v. Henderson (Tenn.Crim.App.), 433 S.W.2d 96.

The petitioner’s uncorroborated testimony does not sustain the burden of proof resting upon him, or justify granting the writ of habeas corpus, where the judgment is regular upon its face and entitled to the presumption of validity. Tibbett v. Hand, 185 Kan. 770, 347 P.2d 353, 355, cert. den. 363 U.S. 854, 80 S.Ct. 1634, 4 L.Ed.2d 1736; Tibbett v. Hand, 294 F.2d 68 (10th Cir. 1961); Ex parte Farrell, 189 F.2d 540 (1st Cir. 1951), cert. den. Farrell v. O’Brien, 342 U.S. 839, 72 S.Ct. 64, 96 L.Ed. 634.

[292]*292Thus, the petitioner fails in his contention that he was unconstitutionally denied effective representation by court-appointed counsel who failed to perfect and prosecute an appeal of his first rape conviction. Moreover, the court Minutes introduced by the petitioner show that his motion for a new trial in that case was withdrawn on the day he was tried in the other two rape cases; and the petitioner testified at the hearing upon his petition that he did not ask his attorney to appeal anything.

With reference to the charge made in his petition that members of the Negro race were systematically excluded from the juries in his cases, the petitioner testified that there were no Negroes on either jury, and that he does not know or say that Negroes were systematically excluded from his juries, and that he had no knowledge of any such exclusion when that averment was placed in his petition by a fellow prisoner who drafted it. The Criminal Court Clerk, called as a witness by the petitioner, testified that Negroes were regularly summoned for jury duty and were not excluded. Being thus clearly without merit, the second Assignment is overruled.

The third Assignment, in which the petitioner complains that, contrary to T.C.A. § 40-2310, no evidence was presented to the jury in the two cases in which he entered pleas of guilty, is untenable. In State ex rel. Edmondson v. Henderson, 220 Tenn. 605, 421 S.W.2d 635, in rejecting the same insistence, the Court said:

“Although T.C.A. § 40-2310 provides that upon a plea of guilty, when the punishment is confinement in the penitentiary, a jury shall be impaneled to hear the evidence and fix the punishment, this is not a constitutionally afforded right, and is waived when a [293]*293defendant, acting on advice of counsel enters a voluntary, knowledgeable plea of guilty, and allows a judgment of conviction to become final. And, moreover, does not exhaust appellate remedies afforded him. So far as we are aware, there is no state or fededal holding that in addition to a voluntary, knowledgeable confession of guilt by a plea of guilty, there must also be proof of the guilt introduced before the jury. In Tennessee, the right under consideration is simply a statutory right, and may be waived. State v. Simmons, 199 Tenn. 479, 287 S.W. 2d 71; McCord and Anglin v. Henderson, Warden, C.A. 6th Cir., 384 F.2d 135, opinion filed October 25, 1967.”

And in McCord v. Henderson, 384 F.2d 135 (6th Cir. 1967), the Court said:

“The evidence given to the jury consisted mainly of a recital of facts made by the Tennessee District Attorney General. Counsel for each petitioner had stipulated to the correctness of such recital.

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Bluebook (online)
453 S.W.2d 434, 2 Tenn. Crim. App. 288, 1969 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 362, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-ex-rel-wyatt-v-henderson-tenncrimapp-1969.