Anglin v. State

Hammond, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The pattern of life of Louis Weiss, a retired automobile •dealer who lives near Pikesville in Baltimore County, includes a yearly winter trip to Florida. In 1965 he went seeking the sun during the last week in January. As he was packing to leave, he put in his bureau drawer a charge-plate in his name, which had come to him in the mail unsolicited.

He paid a fifteen-year old boy who lived across the street a small fee to •check regularly on the condition of his house. Three or four weeks after he had left for Florida, the young man discovered on February 11, 1965, that a rock had been thrown through a -window of the Weiss house, entry had been made and the house ransacked. The young man had last inspected the Weiss home on February 9, two days before the discovery of the breaking •and entering, and found it in order. About three o’clock in the afternoon of February 11, the appellant, Anglin, purchased at a men’s clothing store in downtown Baltimore about two hundred dollars’ worth of clothing, using a charge-plate issued to Louis Weiss.

He asked that the merchandise be wrapped so that he could take it with him, as ⁶⁵⁵ he was leaving for Florida the next day and could not wait for alterations. Several neckties he had bought were left out of the package inadvertently and soon after Anglin had gone the salesman discovered the ties, telephoned the Louis Weiss residence and apparently talked to' the police who were then there investigating the burglary. The police in turn notified the company that had issued the charge-plate. Some four hours later on the same day, Anglin purchased some one hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise at a department store in the Westview Shopping Center on the credit of a charge-plate in the name of Louis Weiss.

The clerk who waited on him testified that because the amount of the purchase was in excess of the charge-plate credit limit, she called the company that had issued the plate and then, as a result, engaged Anglin in a conversation intending to delay his departure from the store. When a uniformed police officer appeared soon thereafter, Anglin calmly worked his way towards the door and then suddenly bolted. The policeman chased him into the arms of another policeman who took him into custody on the Westview parking lot. After the State had produced evidence of these facts before Judge Turnbull, sitting without a jury, Anglin’s counsel moved for judgments of acquittal on the four counts of the information on which he was being tried, which charged respectively, one, breaking with intent to commit a felony, two, breaking with intent to steal and carry away the personal goods of another of any value, three, larceny of the charge-plate and, four, receiving the stolen charge-plate.

The motion was denied and Judge Turnbull told Anglin that he had the right to testify but could not be compelled to testify, and added, “If you do not testify it can in no way be held against you.” To this Anglin replied that he fully understood and assented to the trial judge’s statement that he freely and voluntarily declined to testify. Judge Turnbull then found a verdict of guilty on the second count charging breaking with intent to steal goods of any value, and verdicts of not guilty on the other three counts. The appellant argued in his brief that the evidence was insufficient to permit the trier of fact to convict him of breaking and entering and that there was a reasonable doubt as to whether he was guilty of breaking and entering or of receiving stolen ⁶⁵⁶ goods and therefore he could be convicted only of the less serious crime. The State’s brief answers that Anglin’s exclusive possession of a recently stolen charge-plate, unexplained by the evidence, properly permitted the trier of fact to infer as a fact, beyond reasonable doubt, that he was the thief who had gained access to the stolen article by breaking into the house in which it was located.

In his reply brief, Anglin counters by arguing that the holding of Griffin v. California, 380 U. S. 609 , 14 L. Ed. 2d 106 (there can be no comment at the trial on the failure of an accused to take the stand) and a suggestion in footnote 37 in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436, 468 , 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (“* * * it is impermissible to penalize an individual for exercising his Fifth Amendment privilege when he is under police custodial interrogation. The prosecution may not, therefore, use at trial the fact that he stood mute or claimed his privilege in the face of accusation”) combine to require that “no penalty be placed on the accused’s failure to explain his possession of goods [recently] * * * stolen,” and that “no presumption or inference may be drawn from Appellant’s failure to explain how he came into possession of the charge plate * * Before dealing with the constitutional issue, we turn to the sufficiency of the evidence and the propriety of the verdict. It has long been established in Maryland that, absent a satisfactory explanation, exclusive possession of recently stolen goods permits the drawing of an inference of fact strong enough to sustain a conviction that the possessor was the thief, or, if the circumstances revealed by the testimony so indicate, that he was the receiver of the stolen goods. Pelkner v. State, 218 Md. 300 (burglary); Jordan v. State, 219 Md. 36 , cert. denied 361 U. S. 849 (receiving stolen goods); Butz v. State, 221 Md. 68 (burglary); Glaros v. State, 223 Md. 272, 280 (larceny); Booker v. State, 225 Md. 183 (armed robbery); Lewis v. State, 225 Md. 474 (burglary and larceny); Ponder v. State, 227 Md. 570 (burglary); Boggs v. State, 228 Md. 168 (burglary); Stapf v. State, 230 Md. 106 (larceny); Howard v. State, 238 Md. 623 (burglary).

The reasonableness and legality of permitting an inference of fact that exclusive recent and unaccounted for possession is a ⁶⁵⁷ guilty possession is explained by the rule that there may be drawn an inference of one fact from proof of another or others if there is some rational connection between the fact or facts proved and the ultimate fact inferred so that the inference drawn from the proof is not so far-fetched as to be arbitrary. It is not unreasonable to require the possessor to cause the facts of his possession to be explained if he desires to overcome the prima facie case against him arising from the permissible inference of fact flowing from his possession, because the facts as to that possession are peculiarly within his knowledge and ordinarily are not known or available to the State. In the case before us, Judge Turnbull could have found (as he indicated he did) from uncontroverted evidence that the Weiss house had been broken into no earlier than February 9 and probably on February 11, that the charge-plate was in and had been stolen from the house, and that within days and probably within hours Anglin was in exclusive possession of the plate and was using it as its owner, and this under the Maryland cases cited above justified the inference Judge Turnbull drew that “* * * the only place he could have gotten it, under the evidence in this case [there having been presented no testimony of how Anglin secured the plate or that any other person had been involved in the stealing and handling of the plate], was in the Weiss house.” The evidence offered no reason to find Anglin not guilty of breaking but guilty of receiving. In Jordan v. State, 219 Md. 36, 47 , cited above, Judge Prescott for the ¡majority of the Court found the trial judge to have been justified, on the evidence that several persons were involved in the larceny and on other facts indicating that the accused there was as likely to have been the receiver as the thief, in finding a verdict of receiving stolen goods rather than larceny.

He quoted Judge Cardozo in People v. Galbo (N. Y.), 112 N. E. 1041, 1044 , as follows : “Only half of the problem, however, has been solved when guilty possession fixes the identity of the offender. There remains the question of the nature of his offense. Here again the facts must shape the inference. Is the guilty possessor the thief, or is he a ⁶⁵⁸ receiver of stolen goods?

Judges have said that, if nothing more is shown, we may take him to be the thief. * * * But as soon as evidence is offered that the theft was committed by someone else, the inference changes, and he becomes a receiver of stolen goods.” The inference the facts shaped in the case before us was that Anglin was the thief. See McNamara v. Henkel, 226 U. S. 520 , 57 L. Ed. 330, 333 , in which a man found in possession of an automobile which had been taken from a burglarized garage nearby was convicted of burglary. He argued on appeal that while possession of property recently stolen could be evidence of larceny, it afforded no support for a conviction of burglary. The Court said: “The evidence pointed to the appellant as one having control of the car and engaged in the endeavor [by trying to start the car] to secure the fruits of the burglarious entry.

Possession in these circumstances tended to show guilty participation in the burglary. This is but to accord to the evidence, if unexplained, its natural probative force.” The constitutional issue was not expressly raised or decided below and ordinarily would not be before us for decision, Maryland Rule 885, but the overruling of the appellant’s motion for judgments of acquittal necessarily rested on the basis that the inference of fact the trial judge drew validly could be drawn in the absence of satisfactory explanation of non-culpatory possession, and thus implicitly, the constitutionality of the rule that permitted the inference was raised and decided. The Supreme Court, early and lately, has rejected the claims made here by appellant as to the impermissibility of allowing a trier of fact to infer from a proven fact which is not satisfactorily explained by the accused an