Lloyd Charles Powell v. W. T. Stone, Warden

Before MERRILL and BROWNING, Circuit Judges, and TAYLOR, District Judge.

Late one night appellant and three companions became involved in an altercation in the Bonanza Liquor Store in San Bernardino, California. Mary Parsons, wife of the manager, Gerald Parsons, was shot and killed. Ten hours later, appellant was arrested in Henderson, Nevada, for violation of a local vagrancy ordinance. Testimony regarding this arrest and the discovery of the murder weapon in appellant’s jacket pocket in a search incident to the arrest, was introduced in appellant’s subsequent trial for murder in the Superior Court of San Bernardino County. The California trial court rejected appellant’s objection that the evidence should have been excluded because the Henderson vagrancy ordinance was unconstitutional and the arrest and search incident thereto were therefore illegal. Appellant was convicted of second-degree murder.

The conviction was affirmed by the California Court of Appeal. That court did not pass upon the constitutionality of the Henderson ordinance or the legality of the arrest and search; it affirmed on the ground that admission of the evidence, if error, was harmless under the…