Court Opinion

ID: 9703197
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:44:54.661077+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:46.509506
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Justice,
dissenting.
Although the majority holds that offenses may be joined for trial “where the separate offenses show the defendant’s unusual or distinctive modus operandi,” the majority misapplies its rule to the facts of this case. Manifestly lacking here is evidence that, in the words of Professor McCormick (quoted by the majority), “[t]he device used [is] so unusual and distinctive as to be like a signature.” McCormick on Evidence § 190 at 449 (Cleary ed. 1972). As Judge Spaeth here observed, joined by Judge Hoffman and Judge (now President Judge) Cercone,
“[i]n the first place, in significant respects the two robberies were dissimilar. On robber beat and threatened his victims, the other did not. One robber stole clothing, the other did not. One robber stopped the elevator between floors by pushing the emergency stop button, the *178other stopped it at a floor and apparently did not use the emergency button. One robber either had a weapon or feigned one, the other did not. In the second place, the similarities that did exist between the two robberies were just the sort of similarities as led to the comment in Commonwealth v. Peterson, [453 Pa. 187, 307 A.2d 264 (1975)], that ‘[a]rmed robbery is often a fungible commodity . . . . ’ Thus, if one thinks of robberies in an apartment complex, one will ask, what sort of victim would one expect any such robber to choose — women and children, or men of his own strength? Where would one expect such a robber to board the elevator — at the bottom, where he could wait until a suitable victim boarded, or on another floor, where he would have no control over who might board? In other words there was nothing so distinctive about the two robberies here ‘as to be like a signature,’ McCormick, supra, and thereby ‘show that there is reasonable probability the same person committed both offenses,’ Commonwealth v. Peterson, supra.”
I dissent and would, like Judges Spaeth, Cercone, and Hoffman, hold that appellant’s motion for separate trials should have been granted.