West v. State

451 A.2d 1228, 52 Md. App. 624, 1982 Md. App. LEXIS 371
CourtCourt of Special Appeals of Maryland
DecidedNovember 3, 1982
Docket1555, September Term, 1981
StatusPublished
Cited by29 cases

This text of 451 A.2d 1228 (West v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Special Appeals of Maryland primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
West v. State, 451 A.2d 1228, 52 Md. App. 624, 1982 Md. App. LEXIS 371 (Md. Ct. App. 1982).

Opinion

Moylan, J.,

delivered the opinion of the Court.

We are here called upon to explore a secluded but exotic corner of the double jeopardy garden — prosecutorial and judicial overreaching. In life, it is seldom seen except as an imagined possibility in the most painstakingly thorough of footnotes. As a contention, however, it is in luxuriant vogue and is being resorted to promiscuously. The antidote for the spell of the lotus blossoms is the sobering question, "Is the overreaching conduct that will bar a retrial, following a mistrial which circumstances have forced a defendant to request, limited to the deliberate derailment of a trial in progress or does it also embrace such other misconduct as the insinuating of error into the trial either (1) through gross negligence or (2) consciously, but with a design to win the trial rather than to abort it?” In a holding anticipated by this Court 1 and, in significant measure, by the Court of Appeals, 2 the Supreme Court in Oregon v. Kennedy, U.S. , 102 S.Ct. 2083, 72 L.Ed.2d 416 (1982), has now unequivocally resolved that it is only the deliberate derailing that will engage the gears of the double jeopardy machinery.

The appellant, John Henry West, III, was convicted by a Prince George’s County jury, presided over by Judge Howard S. Chasanow, of first-degree rape. His most serious contention is:

1. That his retrial, following an earlier mistrial, unconstitutionally placed him twice in jeopardy.

*626 The central evidence of guilt is not disputed. The fourteen-year-old rape victim soundly established the corpus delicti of the crime and the criminal agency of the appellant; It is from the peripheral proof that the legal issues have arisen. Involved is the replica of a .45 caliber automatic pistol which the police recovered from the appellant’s apartment and which the rape victim identified as resembling the gun that intimidated her into submission. Involved also is the relationship among (1) the appellant; (2) the appellant’s apartment mate, Mario Torney, on whom the defense blamed the crime; and (3) Mario’s brother, Pierre Torney, the true owner of the .45 caliber replica. An inadmissible hearsay declaration from the lips of Mario Torney triggered the double jeopardy problem. Before we can even consider double jeopardy, however, we must first establish single jeopardy. In this regard, the appellant made one false start.

The Blind Alley of Independent State Grounds

Faced unexpectedly at oral argument with the grim presence of Oregon v. Kennedy (then but two weeks old) and its almost certainly foreclosing effect, appellant’s counsel instinctively dodged by asking this Court to base its double jeopardy holding on independent state grounds, turning to the Maryland Declaration of Rights if the Fifth Amendment should fail to serve. As attractive as the state’s rights gambit might be on other occasions, it is, in the unusual context of double jeopardy law, doomed from the start.

Maryland, we need to remind ourselves periodically, has no constitutional bar against placing a defendant twice in jeopardy. As Chief Judge Bruñe pointed out in Bennett v. State, 229 Md. 208, 212, 182 A.2d 815, the defense of former jeopardy "is not provided for by any provision of the Maryland Constitution” and is only "available in this State as a matter of common law.” Maryland is one of five states that never constitutionalized the law against double jeop *627 ardy. J. Sigler, Double Jeopardy (1969). 3 All five of those states, to be sure, do extend to criminal defendants the protection against double jeopardy, but as that protection has evolved at the common law. At common law, initial jeopardy did not attach until a verdict was rendered. This is still the law in England; to the extent to which Maryland is free to apply its own law rather than the federal law imposed upon it by Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784, 89 S.Ct. 2056, 23 L.Ed.2d 707 (1969), it is the law here as well. Hoffman v. State, 20 Md. 425, 433-434; State v. Shields, 49 Md. 301, 303-304; Gilpin v. State, 142 Md. 464, 121 A. 354.

Under the common law approach, the very subject of retrials following mistrials is not an aspect of double jeopardy law at all. According to the traditional view, a defendant whose trial ends in a mistrial before the rendering of a verdict, has never been in jeopardy. There cannot be a second until there has been a first. In Cornish v. State, 272 Md. 312, 322 A.2d 880, Judge Eldridge spoke to this very proposition, at 272 Md. 316 n. 2:

"The view in this state was that, under the common law’s double jeopardy prohibition, jeopardy did not attach until the rendition of a verdict and that, therefore, a retrial following the declaration of a mistrial did not give rise to a double jeopardy problem.”

See also Kyle v. State, 6 Md.App. 159, 250 A.2d 314; Boone v. State, 3 Md.App. 11, 23-25, 237 A.2d 787. On this subject, independent state grounds is a road leading nowhere.

The Mistrial/Retrial Problem under Federal Constitutional Law

Under the federal version of double jeopardy law, by way of contrast, jeopardy is deemed to attach at the beginning of the trial rather than at its end. The necessity that pushed *628 the attachment of jeopardy backward in time to this earlier stage was the determination by the Supreme Court to cram the mistrial/retrial problem within the coverage of double jeopardy law. As Justice Powell pointed out in his scholarly dissent in Crist v. Bretz, 437 U.S. 28, 98.S.Ct. 2156, 57 L.Ed.2d 24 (1978), that expansion of double jeopardy law occurred late in the evolution of that law and occurred largely subconsciously, as an historic accident.

As a result of those expanded contours, however, the broad umbrella known as double jeopardy (in its federal manifestation) today embraces four distinct subspecies: (1) classic former jeopardy, arising out of the common law pleas in bar of autrefois convict and autrefois acquit; (2) simultaneous jeopardy, involving largely issues of merger and multiple punishment; (3) the problem of the retrial following mistrial; and (4) collateral estoppel. For three of those four subspecies, the common law’s determination that jeopardy attached as the verdict was rendered did not need to be disturbed.

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Bluebook (online)
451 A.2d 1228, 52 Md. App. 624, 1982 Md. App. LEXIS 371, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/west-v-state-mdctspecapp-1982.