Court Opinion

ID: 9762406
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:22:28.839058+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:32.023312
License: Public Domain

*109McDERMOTT, Justice,
dissenting.
On the evening of October 13, 1978, the body of a man was found lying on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia. The man’s rear pocket was ripped and his head battered. A piece of lumber lying nearby fit the possibilities of a robbery and murder. The man was identified as an off-duty police officer and his car was missing. Alarm and hunt swiftly followed. The appellant was in possession of the victim’s car and fleeing for fear or guilt was racing to his home in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Stopped for speeding by state troopers on his way, he jumped from the car, fled over ditch and field to a nearby home, sought the use of a phone, and summoned his girlfriend to drive him home. The officers recalled the name “Hammer” stenciled on his shirt. The next day the state police net ineluctably closed around him. He was apprehended and a search warrant found the victim’s wallet hidden under his bedroom rug. Faced with the coming inculpation of the car and the victim’s wallet, the appellant told police that all was in fact innocent. Unfamiliar with Philadelphia, he said he was in that city for a day’s work as a carpenter, he fell from a scaffold, and while briefly hospitalized, lost contact with his brother. He called home and asked his stepfather to come for him. Believing the airport to be a central location he set that as the place for meeting. Short of money, he started walking to the airport. It was further away and a longer walk than he thought. On Delaware Avenue he met the victim who offered him a ride. During the ride he said the victim made menacing homosexual advances, stopped the car, and at gun point forced appellant out to accomplish his purpose. On the pavement as the victim approached, he saw a piece of wood, scuffled and successfully struck the deceased with the length of wood. The deceased fell to the ground and appellant in fear escaped.
Upon its face, his version has a note of bucolic innocence; a luckless country lad, villainized in the big city, is forced to violence and flees in fear from both the villain and the police. We did not see or hear him; the jury did and to *110them he played all the notes of that scenario. All contradictions, and there were many in his version, were assigned to fear and excitement. The Commonwealth pursued him upon the theory that he came upon a man who was ill and vomitting, struck him down, robbed him, and fled with his car. In a long and thorough trial, the appellant took the stand to explain and the dooming evidence was put to test. The jury found him guilty of third degree murder; that is he intended to do serious bodily harm but did not intend to kill. They might have done more. The majority have done more. They have found that what was essentially a cliche ridden explanation, was further damaged when the trial judge asked certain perfectly proper, relevant questions.
As support for their point, they have chosen excerpts from the record that, standing out of the context of two thousand pages of testimony, are offered to depict the trial judge as an inquisitor, engaging the appellant in questions, the answers to which, at least to their minds, must prove a fatal trap.
The majority opinion enumerates several examples of this so-called “prosecutorial” questioning on the part of the trial court. The first example comes from the direct examination of the appellant by his attorney and concerns a written statement which the appellant asserts was improvised to some extent by the police.
BY MR. DUFFY (Defense Counsel):
Q. AH right. Take a look at page 6, Freddie. Are the words on that page that are next to the “A.” ’s, that is, indicating answers, are those words all your words? A. No, sir, they are not.
Q. Take the first question: “Freddie, Can you tell me what you were wearing last night when the man picked you up?
“I was wearing a short-sleeved denim Navy work shirt with my last name, Hammer, stenciled across the left-hand top pocket, a pair of long johns, and Navy blue denim work pants and work shoes.”
Is that precisely the way you answered the question?
*111A. No, sir, it is not. He told me that my name was stenciled across the left-hand top pocket because the police officers that were downstairs identified me and they said that was what I had across my left-hand top pocket.
BY THE COURT:
Q. But the content of that answer, does that contain exactly what in fact you were wearing?
A. That’s what I told him I was wearing but I never said it like that.
Q. No, but what I’m saying that the content of the answer, is there anything wrong about the clothing described as far as being the clothing actually you were wearing?
A. No, sir, this is the clothing I was wearing.
MR. DUFFY: Is Your Honor finished?
THE COURT: Yes.
BY MR. DUFFY:
Q. Do you know whether you had a shirt on on the night of October 13th that had “Hammer” written across the left breast?
A. I’m not sure. I had a lot of Navy shirts and some of them say “Hammer” on it and some of them don’t.
Q. Amongst the ones that say “Hammer”, are they all identical?
A. No, there are some that say “Hammer, F.P.”, with the initials “F.P.” after it, and some just say “Hammer” on it.
Q. And some that say nothing?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. All right. Do you know what you told the police when they asked you what you were wearing?
A. I told them I was wearing a Navy shirt with Navy pants and a pair of work shoes and some long underwear.
Q. How did the “Hammer” across the pocket come into this answer? That’s what I want you to tell the jury.
A. That’s when they told me that the policemen downstairs identified me as being Hammer because they said *112that my name “Hammer” was stenciled across my left pocket.
Q. All right. Were you asked about your injuries? You said that Detective Graham wanted Pascali to get the injuries down.
Were you asked about the injuries?
A. I was asked earlier. I don’t know if I was asked then.
Q. All right. Did you tell the police — is this your sentence, are these your words: “While running from the police, I fell in the creek face first and my left knee hit a rock. The knee is swollen with numerous scratches and bruises.”
Are those your words?
A. No, sir, I would never say something like that.
Q. Do you remember what you told the police about your injuries, particularly about that area?
A. They asked me earlier why — what was wrong with my knee and I told them that I hit a rock when I fell in the creek. I don’t know where they got numerous scratches and bruises. They are not my words.
BY THE COURT:
Q. Doesn’t this say — the answer: “I fell in the creek and my left knee hit a rock.”
How does that differ from what you told them?
A. I didn’t tell them I fell in the creek face first.
THE COURT: All right.
BY MR. DUFFY:
Q. Did you tell them the knee was swollen with numerous scratches and bruises?
A. No, sir, I never said that.
(N.T. 1146-1149). The majority catagorizes these questions from the bench as repeated interruptions of the direct examination. I, on the other hand, looking at the questions in the context of the whole, believe the judge was doing no more than exercising his right and his duty to clarify issues by interrogating the witness. Commonwealth v. Manning, *113495 Pa. 652, 435 A.2d 1207 (1981). I can only assume that trial counsel felt the same because, as the exerpt shows, he did not protest. A similar review of the other so-called examples of “improprieties by the judge” leads to the inescapable conclusion that counsel had good reason for not objecting; there was nothing to which to object.
To find in the trial judge’s question some other motive, against the inherent and necessary logic of the question, is the reflection in the jaundiced eye. The majority seems more anxious to find fault with the trial judge than to consider the intrinsic question whether appellant received a fair trial. It is true that during surrebuttal the trial judge seemed somewhat disturbed with the proof offered that there are latent propensities in persons that are not known either to themselves or others until they surface. He did not, however, denigrate that common fact. What he did do was question the “scientific proof”. Perhaps it would have been better had he let the witness proceed unquestioned. Notwithstanding his questions however, the witnesses did in fact give their “scientific proofs” that there are closet homosexuals; proof equivalent to the fact it sometimes rains in Indianapolis.
The decision of the majority is disturbing for yet another reason, in that they have this day decidedly weakened the perfectly sound legal principle that objections to perceived trial errors will be waived unless they are made at the time the alleged error occurs. Commonwealth v. Jones, 487 Pa. 183, 409 A.2d 25 (1979); Commonwealth v. Clair, 458 Pa. 418, 326 A.2d 272 (1974). When the perceived error is a claim of judicial partiality, a strict application of that waiver doctrine is inadvisable, says the majority, because a judge is not likely to become impartial simply because he is asked to do so by counsel. And besides, so their rationale goes, the judge might become annoyed.
To make an exception to the waiver doctrine so that counsel may avoid the possibility of antagonizing the trial judge serves no legitimate purpose. An attorney’s first duty in this situation is to his client. A timely objection to a *114real or imagined pattern of judicial impropriety or bias, made on the record, in or out of the jury’s presence, is not too much to ask.
PAPADAKOS, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.