Orlando Fernandez-Delgado v. United States

Appellant, after a trial by the court without a jury, was found guilty of conspiring to smuggle marihuana, and aiding and abetting the smuggling of marihuana in violation of 21 U.S.C.A. § 176a and 18 U.S.C.A. § 2 . He was sentenced to imprisonment for a period of six years on each of the two counts with the sentences to run concurrently. Appellant has appealed from this judgment and sentence.

Jurisdiction existed below under 18 U.S.C.A. § 3231 , and exists here in 28 U.S.C.A. §§ 1291 and 1294.

On this appeal the sole question is the sufficiency of the evidence. This in turn depends upon whether certain oral admissions made by appellant were involuntary and therefore improperly admitted into evidence. Counsel for appellant in argument before this court conceded that if defendant’s extra-judicial admissions were properly admitted by the trial court, the evidence was sufficient to sustain the convictions. Because of this concession the evidence will not be recited in detail.

Although appellant did not specifically raise the question of the voluntariness of the admissions in the lower court, this point was considered and passed upon by the trial judge in connection with appellant’s…