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229 Md. 165

182 A.2d 784

Jones v. State

Court of Appeals of Maryland

Decided July 3, 1962

Court of Appeals of Maryland · decided 1962-07-03

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1962-07-03

How this case has been cited

Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently January 2001 · most notably Lodowski v. State (1986), Winder v. State (2001)

26 state decisions

14019621970198019902000decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Bruñe, C. J.,

¶1filed the following dissenting opinion.

¶2In this case I think that the cross-examination of the defendant with regard to his religious tenets went too far. In the first place, it was not really cross-examination, though the objectionable questions were introduced by a question at least suggesting that the defendant had testified on direct examination with regard to his faith. The fact was that the statement that he was a Moslem had come in through the testimony of a police officer, who first stated that the defendant declined to eat a pork sandwich because of his religion and then in response to a further question stated what the defendant had told him was his religion. The defendant himself said nothing about it on direct examination. In the next place, and this is far more important, because of the publicity which had been given to the alleged tenets of a particular Moslem or Muslim sect, the questioning seems to me to have been almost surely prejudicial, even though the defendant denied holding the widely publicized tenets. It is true that no objection was made to this questioning, but it is also true that no admonition to offset its effect was given, and I believe that the matter is one of which this Court can and should take notice, and that be*176cause of it the judgment should be reversed and a new trial awarded.

¶3I may add that if a new trial were awarded, more full testimony with regard to whether or not the defendant’s confession was properly obtained could probably be presented, but the issue was submitted to the jury under advisory instructions which I think were correct, and the evidence submitted was, in my estimation, sufficient to warrant the jury in arriving at the conclusion that the confession was voluntary and was not induced by threat or deceit or other improper means.

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