Court Opinion

ID: 9746897
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:43:09.885012+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:17.929050
License: Public Domain

Wilner, J.,

dissenting:

I must regretfully and respectfully dissent from the Court’s conclusion, in Turner’s appeal, that the testimony given by the accomplice Morris was sufficiently corroborated or indeed was corroborated at all. The corroboration found by the Court consisted of the very words of Morris, and not any independent evidence. In effect, through the mouths of Williams and Atkinson, Morris has corroborated himself, *381and it occurs to me that the Court’s first blush was the correct one. The State’s argument is "a sort of bootstrapping proposition.”
The majority concludes that Morris’s statements to Williams and Atkinson were reliable becaue they were excited utterances and because they were reliable, they may be given double effect — as primary evidence and as corroboration of that primary evidence. I find this a bit troublesome, for I know not where it leads.
The hearsay rule is riddled with exceptions, each and every one of which is based on the presumed reliability of evidence meeting the requirements of the exception. Is the rule of this case then to be applied not merely to excited utterances but to evidence admitted under some other exception to the hearsay rule? Could the testimony of an accomplice be corroborated, for example, by out-of-court declarations of the accomplice admissible as a declaration against penal or pecuniary interest or by his own written statement, if that statement proved to be admissible as a record kept in the ordinary course of business?
We are not dealing here with whether the out-of-court statements of Morris are reliable, but only whether they suffice as independent corroboration of his testimony; and I fail to see how they can. In Brown v. State, 281 Md. 241 (1977), the Court observed in defense of retaining the requirement of corroboration (p. 246): "We see as much need today, perhaps more so in view of the escalating prosecutorial trend freely to utilize accomplices as State witnesses, to retain the requirement that a person accused of crime not be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice.”
Howard Turner may well have been guilty of robbing and killing Vernon Hoshall, but the problem is that he was convicted solely by the words of his accomplice John Morris without any corroboration thereof. For that reason, I would reverse his conviction.