Court Opinion

ID: 9665981
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:01:24.615265+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:21.683119
License: Public Domain

SEILER, Judge
(concurring).
I know of no warrant for the jailers to hold kangaroo court and decide the punishment for assault and attempted jail break, and I am skeptical about a guilty plea taken from a defendant who concededly has been whipped with a leather belt while forced to spread-eagle himself against the wall and kept naked in a “dry cell” over a period of weeks in the dead of winter, because such attitude on the part of the jailers and treatment at their hands has an element or quality of coercion fixed in its very nature.1 *830Proper inquiry by the court, under Rule 25.04, at the time of the guilty plea would have uncovered these undisputed facts. Had such inquiry been made, I am sure the court would not have left the question hanging in the air as to whether the treatment received by the defendant affected the vol-untariness of the guilty plea.
However, my colleagues, who, needless to say, also disapprove of what went on in the Greene County jail, do not believe it can be said on the record before us that the court clearly erred in holding the jail treatment had no effect on the guilty plea. The question is a close one, but I defer to their judgment and concur.

. This was the second case heard in three days by Division One in the September 1971 term involving claim of coercion by a prisoner in the “dry cell” in the Greene County jail. The other case is 472 S.W.2d 342, Lansdowne v. State, decided November 8, 1971, where defendant was kept in solitary confinement in the dry cell for over seven months.