Court Opinion

ID: 9730230
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:06:11.773312+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:05.154461
License: Public Domain

*104Prescott, J.,
filed the following concurring opinion.
I agree with the result of Judge Henderson’s opinion, but reach the same by slightly different reasoning. The Court is unanimous on the questions relating to the vow dire examination of the talesmen.
However, I agree with Chief Judge Bruñe and Judges Horney and Marbury that the trial judge unduly restricted and limited the cross-examination of the prosecuting witness by defendant’s counsel and also the examination of the defendant’s witnesses, Wolfe and Immerwahr, but feel that, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, neither was prejudicial. It should be remembered that defendant’s counsel in his cross-examination of the prosecuting witness and in his examination of Wolfe and Immerwahr was seeking to have the jury draw an inference that she had had sexual relations with Wolfe or Immerwahr, or both (not with anyone else). After he offered Wolfe and Immerwahr as his own witnesses and asked them whether either had had sexual relations with her and each answered “No,” he negatived the very facts he first sought to establish by inference. By this proof, he rendered the court’s error in limiting his cross-examination of the prosecuting witness and the examination of his witnesses harmless. Obviously a party in a lawsuit cannot ask the triers of fact to infer that a fact occurred which the party proves did not. If appellant’s counsel desired to reserve his objections for appellate review, he should have rested upon his objections and proffers and not have asked Wolfe or Immerwahr whether they had had sexual relations with the prosecuting witness.
As I read Judge Henderson’s opinion (which, of course, is not a majority opinion), where it quotes excerpts from Seibert v. State, 133 Md. 309, 105 A. 161, and deals with permissible testimony in bastardy proceedings, it seems to place the quotes out of context, and it, too, would unduly restrict the testimony that the authorities say can be offered by a defendant in a case of this nature. The incident concerning the man who had “his hands up her [the prosecuting witness’] clothes feeling her legs” occurred more than a year before the birth of the child. There were four persons present at the time of *105the other incident cited where the prosecuting witness was sitting on a man’s lap in a “caressing” manner. The Court simply held that the jury would not be entitled “to infer” sexual relations from these facts alone.
The law seems to be properly and adequately stated in the following excerpts from the opinion in Seibert, the case cited by Judge Henderson:
“ ‘Evidence is admissible to show that the mother had sexual intercourse with other men at about the time the child was begotten, and the mother may be interrogated on this point, but evidence tending to show that she had illicit connection with other men, and interrogatories made with a view to elicit that fact from her must be confined to a period when in the course of nature it would have been possible for the child to be the result of such intercourse.’ ”
“ ‘Evidence that plaintiff kept company with other men at the time when the child might have been begotten is not competent unless offered to show sexual connection with such men. It is not necessary, however, in order to make such evidence competent, that defendant should undertake to adduce positive evidence of complainant’s having had illicit connection with other men. He has a right to pursue any line of investigation that is directed to developing conduct on her part that may even remotely suggest such relation. Consequently association with other men under suspicious circumstances near the period of conception should be allowed to be considered by the jury. But evidence of such association not within the period of gestation is immaterial, except as bearing upon the nature of their relationship.’ ”
“Such evidence may sometimes be very material— especially when the traverser denies the paternity of the child and when he denies that he had ever had sexual intercourse with the prosecuting witness, as this traverser did — but it is of a dangerous character un*106less it is carefully guarded. It may lead to the investigation of collateral matters and take the jury away from the real issue to be determined by it.”