A Girl's Reputation

In theory, every prosecutor is supposedly so much more interested in justice than convictions that he willingly shares his evidence with the defense. In reality, hardly a D.A. alive is about to do any such thing--which is precisely why the Maryland Court of Appeals has been forced to take a stab at defining exactly how much a D.A. can keep the defense in the dark.

In 1961 three young Montgomery County Negroes were charged with raping a 16-year-old white girl who had parked with her white boy friend at a remote spot near Spencerville along the Patuxent River. They offered a classic defense. As they told it, Joyce Roberts actually volunteered,* after saying that she had already had sexual relations with 16 or 17 other boys that week. As Joyce recounted the incident, though, the Negroes had knocked out her boy friend and forced her to submit to intercourse with them. An all-white jury believed Joyce. The Negroes were given a death sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Psychopathic Personality. What the Montgomery County D.A. knew--and did not reveal at the trial--was that before the alleged rape, Joyce had a history of delinquency and psychiatric care that might have cast doubt on her story of nonconsent. In addition, shortly before the trial, she had gone to a party in nearby Prince George's County and had had sexual intercourse with two white boys, one of whom had been her partner several times before. After she attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills and spent nine days in a local hospital, she was diagnosed as "a psychopathic personality." When Joyce's father accused the two white boys of rape, she refused to press the charges against them, and Prince George's police marked the case as "closed and unfounded."

All this evidence of what they called Joyce's "possible nymphomania" was only later discovered by newly appointed lawyers for two of the Negro prisoners, the brothers James and John Giles. On appeal, they claimed that suppression of the unhappy facts of Joyce's life had denied the brothers due process of law. A lower court agreed and granted a new trial.

By a vote of 8 to 2, the Maryland Court of Appeals last week forbade that trial on the grounds that a prosecutor is obliged to disclose only "exculpatory evidence," meaning decisive facts "capable of clearing or tending to clear the accused of guilt." As the court saw it, the apparently not-so-sharp defense in the original trial "already knew or should have known" that Joyce was "a sexually promiscuous girl." The court held that the new evidence added little or nothing to that fact. To say that the new evidence might have further swayed the jury "would be to engage in sheer speculation."

Exploratory Evidence. In sharp dissent, Judge Reuben Oppenheimer insisted that the defense was entitled to the benefit of that speculation. His brethren wrongly "put themselves in the place of the triers of fact," he said, and ignored the rule that extra care for due process is required in capital cases. When life is at stake, declared Judge Oppenheimer, citing several Supreme Court decisions to bolster his argument, elementary fairness demands full disclosure and cross-examination so that the jury itself may decide whether evidence is exculpatory. Though it failed to carry his court, Judge Oppenheimer's dissent may prove exculpatory if the Giles case is appealed further.

* In Maryland, a man is guilty of the felony of statutory rape (intercourse with or without consent) only if the girl is under 14.

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