Randolph v. State

Orth, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. On 20 January 1969 at 1:30 P.M. Policewoman Inez Haynie was working a purse snatch detail with Officers Mathew Boyd and Joseph Mitchell. At the corner of Eutaw Street and Brooks Lane in Baltimore City she saw four men, later identified as Edward Leroy Randolph, Frederick Allen Jones, Jerome Garland Stewart, Jr., and Theodore Kellam. “They came up Eutaw Street and turned west onto Brooks Lane. * * * They approached the corner going towards Madison Avenue and they were whispering, exchanging jackets, and I walked down as they were doing this. * * * I heard one of [them] say, ‘Maybe we can get into that house today.’ And during this time they were exchanging jackets.” She told Boyd and Mitchell, who were in a marked police car, what she had seen and heard. The four men had gone up Madison Avenue.

She and Mitchell followed them in the car and Boyd on foot. The men went south on Madison, crossed North Avenue and were heading towards Bloom Street ⁹¹ when two of them stopped and the other two “continued going on disappearing into a house on the corner of Presstman and Madison Avenue.” Kellarn was near a cleaning establishment and Jones was about 30 feet up the block on the east side of Madison Avenue. About 10 or 15 minutes later Stewart and Randolph “came back from this particular house at Presstman Street and Madison Avenue crossing to the east side of the street, which I was standing at Bloom and Madison.” Randolph stopped to pull up his stocking and Stewart said, “You have pushed harder. You messed me up.” “And at this he went into right pants pocket and pulled a gun and pointed it at Mr. Randolph.” Boyd, in plainclothes, was about 10 feet away.

He told Stewart that he was a police officer. “And as I reached for my badge case he says to me ‘Who?’ So I said, ‘You. Drop the gun.’ At this — at this I turned —half turned. By this time Mr. Randolph, he backed off away and Mr. Stewart kept coming around. At this, when I cleared and shot him in the knee, the right knee.” At the time Stewart’s gun was pointed at the officer.

Stewart ran. Boyd pursued him and apprehended him in an alley in the rear of Gold Street and Madison Avenue. The gun, dropped by Stewart during his flight, was recovered. It was a .22 caliber, 6 shot Rowan revolver fully loaded.

Mitchell arrested Randolph, Jones and Kellarn on the scene. Jones and Kellarn were walking toward a filling station and Randolph was “standing by the fence still looking.” The police checked “the whole block” to ascertain whether a home had been “burglarized.” They found nothing. One of the men told the police that he knew a girl that lived in the house they went in. Boyd said they checked and no one was at home in the dwelling.

The four arrestees were jointly charged with unlawfully conspiring “together and with each other and with certain persons” whose names were unknown to the Grand Jurors “to violate the Burglary Laws of the State of Maryland,” jointly tried by the court in the Criminal Court of Baltimore and convicted. 1 ⁹² We said in Jones v. State, 8 Md. App. 370 , 375 that conspiracy is a combination by two or more persons to accomplish a criminal or unlawful act, or to do a lawful act by criminal or unlawful means. In Maryland it is a common law. misdemeanor and the gist of it is unlawful combination, no further overt act being required to constitute the crime. Combination results from agreement, so there must be a meeting of the minds — a unity of design and purpose. The agreement may be shown by circumstantial evidence from which an inference of common design may be drawn; it is not necessary to demonstrate that the conspirators met and agreed in terms to a design and to pursue it by common means.

Boddie and Brooks v. State, 6 Md. App. 523, 535 . Appellant was charged with conspiring to accomplish a criminal act — to violate the “Burglary Laws.” We pointed out in Reagan v. State, 4 Md. App. 590, 594-595 , that in this jurisdiction there are. three separate felonies under which the breaking of a dwelling house is proscribed — common law burglary, the penalty