TERESA ROSS v. STATE OF MARYLAND
Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, Moylan, March 3, 2017,
Sufficiency- Circumstantial evidence alone is sufficient to sustain a conviction to the same extent as testimonial evidence
It is a tale, told by a learned man, spanning 37 pages, but signifying nothing
I’ll clean this up later.
Sufficient evidence to convict store employee of theft where evidence was consisted largely of repeated green-lit transactions for a credit-card fraud scheme without going through the proper approval procedures.
Facts:
Unbeknownst to either Bryan Jansen or James Miller during the period covered by these events, there was a “flaw” in the verification process with respect to the authorization codes. It might more accurately be described as an Achilles heel. Evidently, while an American Express authorization code must always consist of six numeric digits, any six digits will suffice. So too with any five digits and a letter in the case of a Discover Card. To reiterate, this loophole was not common knowledge.
Between July 31, 2014 and October 13, 2014, over forty high-end Samsung televisions were stolen from the Sears Department Store in Annapolis with a total value in excess of $200,000. The mode of theft can generally be described as credit card fraud, perpetrated through the coordinated efforts of numerous parties, known and unknown.
A drone may release a bomb and incinerate a building in the outback of Afghanistan while the hand that guides the drone and releases the bomb sits quietly before a control panel in Colorado Springs. If called before a court of inquiry, that hand at the control panel will not enjoy the alibi of having been half a world away nor be able to invoke the disclaimer of never having touched the drone. The phenomenon of aiding and abetting, if not indeed that of first-degree principalship, has undergone a sea change.
The actus reus of this particular theft, as we have said, was highly unusual. Between July 2014, and October 2014, a group of thieves of unknown number devised a sophisticated scheme whereby they were able to steal approximately forty-eight (48) highly priced flat-screen/curve-screen television sets from the theft victim, the Sears Holding Corporation (“Sears”), amounting to a potential loss to Sears of $204,000. Throughout the entire course of this operation, however, no culprit was ever required to lay a heavy hand on a single item of stolen property. Except in a constructive sense, there was neither a common law asportation nor a common law caption. It would have bewildered Blackstone. It was all done by telephone.
The Supreme Court addressed this for federal cases in 1954:
Circumstantial evidence in this respect is intrinsically no different from testimonial evidence. Admittedly, circumstantial evidence may in some cases point to a wholly incorrect result. Yet this is equally true of testimonial evidence. In both instances, a jury is asked to weigh the chances that the evidence correctly points to guilt against the possibility of inaccuracy or ambiguous inference. In both, the jury must use its experience with people and events in weighing the probabilities. If the jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, we can require no more.
“[T]he critical inquiry on review of the sufficiency of the evidence to support a criminal conviction … is whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That standard applies to all criminal cases, regardless of whether the conviction rests upon direct evidence, a mixture of direct and circumstantial, or circumstantial evidence alone.