Court Opinion

ID: 9665243
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:43:13.460912+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:14.149839
License: Public Domain

ON MOTION FOR REHEARING.
MORRISON, Judge.
Appellant has very capably challenged our original opinion herein. He re-urges his contention that he was deprived of “due process of law” guaranteed to him by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States when the trial court permitted the introduction into evidence of appellant’s confession. At the outset, we observe that appellant did not testify, nor did he offer any witnesses in his behalf. From this, it follows that appellant must have shown from the state’s witnesses that the confession was secured in some manner heretofore denounced by this court or the Supreme Court of the United States in order to support his contention.
We observe, from the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in Gallegos v. Nebraska, 96 L. Ed., advance sheet opinion at page 88, that the rule in McNabb v. United States, 318 U. S. 332, to the effect that a confession is inadmissible if made during illegal detention, due to failure promptly to carry a prisoner before a committing magistrate, does not apply to trials in state courts.
In the case at bay, since there was no showing of torture, physical or psychological, appellant is relegated to the complaint that he was arrested without a warrant and was not taken before a magistrate forthwith.
This contention seems to have been decided adversely to *167appellant in our recent opinion in Dimery v. State, 156 Tex. Cr. R. 197, 240 S. W. (2) 293. Goleman v. State, No. 25,504, this day decided.
In the instant case, the appellant was arrested somewhere between 9:00 and 10:30 in the evening, and the confession was signed the following morning at approximately 8:30. There is no showing of any brutality upon the accused, and the fact that several officers participated in the interrogation, and that one of them went out for coffee from time to time, does not in itself alone show that appellant was questioned in relays. It is obvious that these facts do not bring themselves within the ruling in Prince v. State, 155 Tex. Cr. R. 108, 231 S. W. (2d) 419, where the questioning covered a period of three days, or under the rule expressed in any of the cases cited therein.
The fact that appellant made an oral confession shortly after being apprehended lends corroboration to the voluntary nature of the written confession, to the introduction of which appellant now objects, just as did the plea of “guilty” at the preliminary hearing in the Gallegos case in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Appellant takes us to task for some of the statements of fact found in our original opinion. An analysis of the opinion will reveal that each of the statements complained of were quotes from the testimony of the witnesses. In stating the facts of a case, we do not draw our own conclusions, but attribute them to the witness who gave them at the trial.
Appellant again contends that he is not shown to have been a principal to the murder of Mrs. Twitchell and says that the cases cited in our original opinion do not support our conclusion. Without discussing them, we here hold that where two men pool their funds to buy a pistol, planning to “pull some kind of a job,” and a third party is later killed during the course of a robbery at which both of the purchasers of the pistol were present, each of them is a principal to the murder.
Remaining convinced that we properly disposed of this case originally, appellant’s motion for rehearing is overruled.