Commonwealth v. Turner

Opinion by

Me. Chief Justice Jones,

The trials of the appellant for murder for the same felonious homicide have amounted to a near tragedy of errors and all because the prosecution was initially conceived and undertaken on confessions wrung from the appellant and his co-defendants by coercive third-degree police methods which served to render the confessions incompetent as evidence.

*243Five times, the appellant has been convicted by a jury of murder in the first degree. Upon each of the first four convictions, the penalty was fixed at death; at the fifth trial, which is now before us for review,…