Rhodes v. State

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Appellant Rhodes was convicted by the court, without a jury, of receiving stolen goods of a value of more than $100.00 and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He claims in his appeal that the evidence was insufficient to permit conviction and that the value of the goods was not shown to be $100.00 or over so that the sentence was illegal as exceeding the maximum under Code, 1957, Art. 27, Sec. 467 (three years, if the value of the goods received is under $100.00). The testimony was that in the early morning hours of February 20, a drug store in Baltimore was broken into and $1,100.00 in cash, and narcotics, cigarettes, cigars and various other articles of the value of $1,700.00 were stolen.

One ²⁸¹ Stein was convicted of the burglary. About ten o’clock on February 19, Stein and Rhodes had come into the drug store and stayed briefly. Rhodes had prior convictions of burglary and of breaking and entering, both times with Stein. A blue suitcase and a brown leather bag, each full of things positively identified as having been in the drug store, were admittedly taken by Rhodes from Stein’s home to the home of the woman with whom Stein lived—a friend of Rhodes—and put in her cellar about nine o’clock in the evening of February 20.

Rhodes said when he saw Stein arrested in an alley outside his home that he told the woman about the arrest and she, in turn, asked him to bring Stein’s suitcase and bag to her house, and that he did so, not knowing what was in them. She denied his version and said that a girl who lived at her house let Rhodes bring the bags in and put them in the cellar. She opened the blue bag and found it full of cartons of cigarettes. Rhodes came back to her house late that night and she told him she did not want the “stuff” in her house and to take the bags out.

He said he would do so the next day. The girl living at the house corroborated this version of the occurrence. A brown cardboard box was found at the home of Rhodes’ mother, in which, among other things, were a de luxe alarm clock and cartons of various kinds of cigarettes