Ferrell v. State

MOYLAN, Judge. A murder defendant who testifies that he consciously directed deadly force at the murder victim, because he believed that that force was necessary to save his own life, has himself established a prima facie case of the decisional component of first-degree murder. The appellant, William Thomas Ferrell, Jr., was convicted by a Prince George’s County jury, presided over by Judge Arthur M. Ahalt, of first-degree murder, assault with intent to murder, and two counts of illegally using a handgun. The single issue raised by the appellant on this appeal is his claim that the evidence was not legally sufficient to support a verdict of first-degree murder.

More narrowly, the only challenge to the legal sufficiency of the evidence deals with the time interval between the decision to kill and the pulling of the trigger. It is unnecessary to consider the amplitude of evidence supplied by a number of witnesses for the State that the appellant, as part of a team of street sellers of narcotics, had abundant time to make a premeditated, deliberate, and willful decision before “wasting” two troublesome buyers, wounding one with a bullet to the neck and killing the other with a bullet to the head. We are content to answer the appellant’s contention by pointing out that he, ironically, supplied the prima facie case itself when he offered his version of the criminal episode grounded in self-defense. The law is now clear that although a jury may seize upon such ambiguous notions as “willfulness,” “deliberation,” and “premeditation” to grade murders in terms of their atrocity and blameworthiness, a literal prima facie case as to those notions (so far as the time interval is concerned) — and, therefore, as to murder in the first de ⁴⁶² gree — has been made out whenever the evidence reveals a specific intent to kill.

As we pointed out in Smith v. State, 41 Md.App. 277, 319 , 398 A.2d 426 (1979): “When dealing with murder of the specific-intent-to-kill variety, it would not appear that there.is any necessary content, as an absolute matter of law, to the words. Whenever there is evidence of a specific intent to kill, it follows that there is at least a permitted inference of wilfulness, deliberation and premeditation as these terms have been liberally interpreted by latter-day case law.” 1 Chief Judge Gilbert spoke to this very subject in Brown v. State, 44 Md.App. 71, 78 , 410 A.2d 17 (1979), “The trilogy of terms connotes the same general idea — the intention to kill. The use of all three words seems to us to serve no purpose other than