43 NY 1 (1870)
On November 2, 1869, New York’s voters gave their approval to various amendments of the Judiciary Article of the State Constitution. Perhaps the most significant of these amendments was a newly structured Court of Appeals consisting of a chief judge and six associate judges selected by popular election to 14-year terms. In its first reported decision, the new Court of Appeals unanimously reversed a capital murder conviction.
Maurer was charged with murdering Joachim Fuerter in March 1869. The men had met on board the ship that brought them to America from Germany in October 1868. Maurer later borrowed money from Fuerter on several occasions and in March 1869 he arranged to meet Fuerter in Rockland County to repay him. Fuerter was found dead in a field, his body disfigured by deep knife gashes and blows from a stone. It came out at trial that two days before the body was found Maurer asked two individuals at his place of work if they had heard about Fuerter’s murder. A hat identified as belonging to Maurer was found at the scene, and pawn tickets for the victim’s missing coat and pantaloons were found in Maurer’s possession together with a considerable sum of money.
The trial was held before Judge Abraham B. Tappen in the Rockland County Court of Oyer and Terminer. The jury began its deliberations at 9:00 p.m. and returned to the courtroom at midnight to question the judge about the pawned clothes and defendant’s statement. The defendant was not brought into the courtroom when the jury’s questions were posed to the judge, but defendant’s counsel was present and made no objection to the judge’s answers. The jury returned a verdict of guilty and Judge Tappan imposed a sentence of death.
On appeal, Judge Martin Grover, writing for a unanimous court, reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial on the ground that the statute governing criminal trials provided that no person indicted for any felony could be tried unless personally present “during such trial.” The court concluded that the defendant’s presence in the courtroom was essential to the legality of the trial, and neither the defendant nor his counsel could validly consent to the defendant’s absence or waive his presence. The Court further held that “during such trial” included proceedings surrounding the court’s charge to the jury and any further communications between the court and the jury. The court rejected the People’s argument that the defendant was not prejudiced by the communications between judge and jury:
… the fact, if established, would be no answer to the objection. Any instructions of information given by the court to jury, having a tendency to influence the verdict, is, within the statute, a proceeding upon the trial, and this is prohibited unless the accused be present. A trial, wholly or in part, conducted in his absence is illegal, and he has an absolute right to a reversal of the judgment, and to a new trial.
Judge Francis Bergan commenting on this case in his history of the Court of Appeals observed that there was no clear precedent at the time compelling the court to take such a strict and literal construction of the statute in question. The policy expressed in Maurer went on to become a settled New York rule and “part of the embedded technical thinking of judges and lawyers.”
The new court in 1870 was free to be less technical and to hold, if counsel was present and able to evaluate the correctness of the judge’s answers to questions concerning a record already made, that the procedure was not error unless there was actual or potential prejudice to the accused. None was shown here. The error, on the face of it, seemed a sterile technical omission. . . . The chance of freeing the criminal law from the adverse effect of technicalities not affecting fairness and not causing prejudice was lost at the very beginning of the new court’s life.
According to the Rockland County Journal for May 13, 1871, Antoine Maurer was tried again and convicted of Manslaughter in the First Degree.
Sources
Francis Bergan, The History of the New York Court of Appeals, 1847-1932 (1986), pp. 145-146.
The Spring Valley Murder, New York Times, Oct. 22, 1869.
Rockland County Journal, Oct. 23, 1869; May 13, 1871.