Lomp v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Judge Oppenheimer, sitting in the Criminal Court of Baltimore without a jury, found sufficient corroboration of the ⁵³⁸ testimony of an accomplice to convict the appellant, Lomp, of larceny and conspiracy to violate the law against larceny. This appeal challenges the sufficiency of the corroboration. In the early morning hours of July 8, 1962, the police received a call that a filling station in Baltimore had been robbed.

At the station they interrogated the attendant, Cates, who, as he later testified, first told them that a colored man hit him and took $50.00 of the station’s money, and then changed his story and said that Lomp, whom he knew, had come to the station about 2:30 a.m. on July 8 to talk, that Lomp said he needed money, that “he’d do about anything for it,” that “I’d just about rob you,” and then they talked a while and decided to take the money and split it. Lomp took $25.00 down to Cates’ car, put it in the glove compartment, came back and took another $25.00, hit Cates on the head so as to furnish verisimilitude to the story of the colored man and left. Cates then testified he “called the law afterwards.” Lomp admitted that he was at the filling station talking to Cates from two or two-thirty to four o’clock but claimed he left no later than four. Lomp’s mother came in from a party at three, and Lomp was not home; but when she checked again at four-thirty, he was in bed, apparently asleep.

She said Lomp was out of work and that she had been giving him small amounts of money for transportation to look for work and for haircuts and cigarettes. In the City Jail awaiting trial, Lomp and Cates remained on friendly terms, although Lomp knew Cates had told the police that he, Lomp, had masterminded and participated in the theft. Judge Oppenheimer became convinced that Cates had told the truth and that he had neither the imagination nor the initiative to plan the larceny and no motive to testify other than truthfully. He considered that the details of the crime were “consistent with the makeup of the defendant Lomp rather than of the defendant Cates.” He was not unmindful of Lomp’s testimoney that he was friendly with Cates in jail and gave him cigarettes, saying that he did not believe Lomp to be a man who would forgive an attempt to implicate him falsely in a crime of which he was innocent, so that he found support for his judgment