Petitioner William Ward, a negro, was indicted at the September, 1939 term of the District Court of Titus County, Texas for the murder of Levi Brown, a white man. He was placed on trial at that term but the jury was unable to agree upon a verdict. At the January, 1941 term he was again tried and found guilty of murder without malice, the jury assessing his punishment at confinement in the State penitentiary for three years. Upon appeal the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the judgment of the District Court. On the State's motion for rehearing the Court reversed itself and affirmed the judgment. Petitioner's motion for rehearing was denied, one Judge dissenting. 158 S.W.2d 516. A petition for a writ of certiorari was granted in forma pauperis. 316 U.S. 653, 62 S.Ct. 1040, 86 L.Ed. --.
The evidence introduced at the trial was such that the jury could have drawn the following conclusions: The deceased, who was seventy-two years old, lived in Omaha, in Morris county. He had previously resided at Mount Pleasant, in the adjoining county of Titus. He went to Mt. Pleasant on Saturday, June 24, 1939. On Saturday evening he was seen for the last time, talking to petitioner and a negro woman on a street corner two and a half blocks south of where his body was found. He then moved off northward along the street followed at a little distance by petitioner and the woman. A short time later petitioner and the woman returned to the corner. They separated there and she walked off to the south while he returned in the direction in which the deceased had gone. The body was discovered on Sunday morning lying in a field in grass about knee high. There were no signs of a struggle and no evidence of robbery. The skin on the neck was bruised and discolored, the face was swollen and the eyes distended. The front of the trousers was open and there was blood on the tail of the shirt. For some time the deceased had been afflicted with a heart ailment and under advice of his physician regularly took digitalis. He had taken a dose on Saturday before leaving his home. The examining physician, however, found that death was due to strangulation.
The Court of Criminal Appeals in its final opinion denying petitioner's motion for a rehearing (158 S.W.2d 523) concluded: 'It may be stated bluntly that no conviction could be sustained in the present case without the confession of appellant.' The details of the confession need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that in it petitioner stated that under his agreement with deceased he was to receive one dollar; that the deceased refused to pay him and cursed him and hit him; that he grabbed the deceased, choked him for nearly five minutes, and not knowing whether he was dead or alive left him on the ground.
Petitioner contends that this confession was signed by him only after he had been arrested without a warrant, taken from his home town, driven for three days from county to county, placed in a jail more than 100 miles from his home, questioned continuously, and beaten, whipped and burned by the officer to whom the confession was finally made. We granted certiorari in order to determine whether the confession was the result of such coercion and duress that its use by the State at the trial constituted a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
In its first opinion reversing the judgment of conviction the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that the methods employed in obtaining the confession violated applicable Texas statutes. It added that the reversal of the conviction was 'in keeping with the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in White v. State of Texas, 310 U.S. 530, 60 S.Ct. 1032, 84 L.Ed. 1342,' in which we set aside a conviction because it was based upon a confession obtained by means repugnant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in its second opinion reinstating the judgment of conviction the Court of Criminal Appeals decided that there was a conflict of evidence with respect to the issues upon which the admissibility of the confession depended and that the question of admissibility was solely for the jury and had been submitted with proper instructions. It concluded that 'no matter what our personal belief might be, we do not feel that we have, nor do we usurp the power to set aside the finding of this jury in the case at bar.'