Barnette v. State

Morton, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. William Barnette and William Crawford, the appellants, appeal from convictions for storehouse breaking and being rogues and vagabonds in a trial in the Criminal Court of Baltimore, Judge Thomas J. Kenney presiding without a jury. Each appellant was sentenced to a term of eighteen months under the major charge and to a term of six months, concurrent, on the minor charge. The sole question presented on appeal is the sufficiency of the evidence to support the convictions. ⁷ There was evidence from which the trial judge could have found that at 1:20 A. M. on July 19, 1967, William Barnette was found standing at the corner of Forrest and Monument Streets with his hand on his left side and blood dripping from his hand.

He was located approximately 60 feet from a broken window in the warehouse owned by Merchants Terminal Corporation located at Forrest and Monument Streets. Crawford was found coming from the broken window. When he observed a police officer approaching he went back into the building but immediately turned around and came out of the hole in the window. Both police officers observed blood stains around the window and near a desk which was “three-quarters of the room away” from the broken window.

Crawford was uninjured. The manager of the warehouse testified that the building was closed and the window intact at the time of closing on July 18th. The office contained movable equipment valued at five to six hundred dollars, and the warehouse contained millions of pounds of frozen food valued in millions