Court Opinion

ID: 9618592
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:13:59.781209+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:31:37.842204
License: Public Domain

BARROW, Judge,
dissenting.
While I agree that the evidence sufficiently supports a finding that the defendant possessed copper bars similar to those inventoried at the nearby GE plant, I also believe the *359evidence does not support a finding that any such copper bars were stolen. Therefore, I would reverse the judgment of conviction.
The prosecution must prove, in every criminal case, that a crime has been committed and that the defendant committed it. Id. In this case, the prosecution did not prove that a crime was committed. See Maughs v. City of Charlottesville, 181 Va. 117, 120, 28 S.E.2d 784, 786 (1943).
Maughs is strikingly similar to this case. In Maughs, police saw the defendant’s automobile parked on a street parallel to railroad tracks where the railroad had recently laid new track and placed some “old tie plates” beside the tracks. They watched the defendant “make three or four trips from his automobile to the railroad tracks and heard him ‘hammering tools’ of some sort.” Id. at 120, 23 S.E.2d at 785. When the police approached the defendant, he fled in his automobile at a high speed in spite of three warning shots fired in the air by the police. Id. Later, when they apprehended the defendant, the police found twenty-one tie plates in his automobile. Id. at 120, 23 S.E.2d at 786.
Two railroad employees who testified at trial could not say that the tie plates belonged to the railroad, although from the circumstances, they “would think so.” Id. Further, they were unabl'e to say that any tie plates were missing from the pile beside the tracks. Id. The Court held that the prosecution failed to prove the corpus delicti, that the tie plates had been stolen.3 Id.
In this case, the prosecution also failed to prove the corpus delicti, that the copper bars the defendant possessed were stolen. At the time the defendant was found with the copper bars, employees at the GE plant could not determine if any copper bars were missing from their inventory. No stamps or marks identified the bars in the defendant’s possession as belonging to GE. GE purchased such bars by the pound, in *360different sizes, in random lengths, some with rounded edges and also some with square edges. Nothing about the bars in the defendant’s possession identified them as “a unique item to GE.” The GE employees could not distinguish a copper bar which had been purchased by GE from any other copper bar in the industry. One of the bars the defendant possessed had not been in GE’s inventory for three years.
The only evidence supporting a finding that copper bars were missing from the GE inventory at any time was the evidence introduced showing the difference between two annual inventories. GE inventoried the bars on July 14, 1992, and again on the same day in 1993, and found “a difference in quantity of a hundred and thirty-three pounds.” When the police apprehended the defendant on April 24, 1993, he had 416 pounds of copper. No one explained the discrepancy between the amount missing from the inventory and the amount found in the defendant’s possession. The copper taken from the defendant was immediately turned over to GE, and, yet, the employee who testified about the results of the inventory did not know whether that copper had been included in the inventory. Significantly, the same employee testified that “there’s some copper missing that is traceable to being used within the GE plant,” indicating that some of the copper missing from the inventory may have been used by GE.
The inventory proved only that, for some unexplained reason, during the year, some copper may have been missing from GE’s inventory. It did not prove that, in fact, copper was missing, nor did it prove that any copper bars were stolen from GE at any time, particularly close in time to the defendant’s possession of them.
Consequently, the prosecution did not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the copper bars found in the defendant’s possession were stolen. Therefore, I would reverse his conviction.

. Whether Maughs states the currently applicable law rests with the Supreme Court or the General Assembly.