Court Opinion

ID: 9558166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:03:38.999204+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:08:23.149214
License: Public Domain

*155Mr. Justice Moore
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. I find no decision of this Court which contains any language requiring a third trial of this defendant. The statements quoted in the majority opinion from decisions written in other cases were clearly applicable to the factual situations under consideration in those cases. There is no similarity between them and the instant case insofar as the controlling question is concerned.
In the first trial of the defendant the evidence clearly established, without one word of contradiction, that the defendant in the course of a robbery beat his victim to death by striking him in the head with a hammer and after the handle of the hammer broke off he finished the job with an eighteen-inch pipe wrench.
The “felony murder” statute makes such a killing murder of the first degree, and the only question that could possibly have remained for the jury to decide was the question as to whether the defendant should be put to death or serve the rest of his life in prison.
The jury condemned the defendant to death. Out of an abundance of caution this Court held that the trial court erred in not making it possible for a psychiatrist to give testimony which might conceivably have caused the jury to reduce the penalty to life imprisonment. The only error committed by the trial court upon the first trial related exclusively to the matter of the penalty to be paid by the defendant.
Upon the second trial the court limited the question to be decided by the jury to whether the penalty should be life imprisonment or death. The evidence which was not produced at the first trial and which was the only reason for the granting of a second trial, was not presented to the jury when the case was retried.
At the first trial no defense to the “felony murder” was offered; the sole question was: “How shall the guilty man be punished?” At the second trial no offer *156of proof from any witness was made tending to prove that the defendant did not commit a robbery in the course of which he hammered his victim to death. Not one word can be found in the record of either case to indicate that any issue except that of the punishment to be meted out remained for jury consideration. Two different juries have considered this question and fixed the penalty at death. I think the action taken by the trial court upon the second trial was consistent with common sense in the absence of any new plea raising the issue of sanity, and in the complete absence of any offer of proof tending to absolve the defendant of guilt of a murder committed in the perpetration of a robbery. I fail to see how the defendant could possibly be prejudiced by the court’s action.
Under the circumstances of this case, I am unable to find anything in the statute which prohibits the action taken by the trial court. A third trial in this case will serve no purpose other than to exalt the “form” of things at the sacrifice of “substance.”
The procedure followed by the trial court upon the second trial of this case was in all respects the same as that followed by the Supreme Court of Maryland in Brady v. State, 226 Md. 442, 174 A. (2) 167, and the statute there under consideration in all pertinent provisions was the same as our own. The judgment in that case was reviewed by the United States Supreme Court and affirmed. Brady v. State of Maryland, 83 S. Ct. 1194, 373 U.S. 83.
I would affirm the judgment.
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Pringle joins in this dissent.