Braxton v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Alvin Braxton was convicted by a jury of murder in the first degree for the shooting of a Baltimore City policeman, and sentenced to die by the administration of lethal gas. His appeal claims reversible error in the admission in evidence of the revolver used in the shooting, and its shells, and in the legal insufficiency of the evidence to sustain the verdict. Braxton, a seventeen year old youth, with two of his friends, attempted an armed robbery of a liquor store in Baltimore.

While fleeing the scene, he was shot in the leg by a policeman and disarmed. He was entrusted to the custody of police officers Phelan and Weintraub, who put him in an ambulance to be taken to nearby Lutheran Hospital. The officers rode in the ambulance with him. According to the State’s version of what happened on the way to the hospital, Braxton was lying on the ambulance litter, moaning as if in pain (although he was actually “playing possum”), when he suddenly rose up, snatched Officer Phelan’s gun and fired it three times.

One shot wounded Officer Weintraub, and another went through Officer Phelan’s chest, and caused his death soon after. Braxton’s version of the shooting is that the two officers were hitting him to make him tell who his companions were, saying that they were going to kill him; Officer Weintraub dropped his gun on the floor of the ambulance and was trying to pick it up, but he, Braxton, “beat him to the gun”, and when Officer Phelan subsequently charged into him, “the gun went off several times.” ³⁷³ Braxton got out of the ambulance, dragging Officer Phelan with him to the street. He then jumped into the left front seat of a taxicab which had stopped behind the ambulance, pointed the gun at the driver, and told him to drive off. A struggle ensued between Braxton and the cab driver, during which Braxton dropped the gun, and he and the cab driver rolled into the street.

Braxton fled but was later apprehended in another cab, holding a knife (which he had stolen by breaking into a nearby house) at the driver’s side in an effort to consummate his escape. The driver of the first taxicab said that he didn’t find the gun that had been dropped by Braxton until he parked his cab at the curb and noticed the gun between the flag of the meter and the dashboard. He told the police about it, and an officer took the gun. Sergeant Taylor testified that in the course of the investigation, his attention was directed to the Sun cab that had been behind the ambulance and specifically to a revolver lying between the meter and the dashboard.

Under his direction and in his presence, the gun was picked up. It bore the serial number 266433. He checked the records of the police department and found that the gun had been