Moore v. State
| Decision Date | 04 November 1941 |
| Docket Number | 8 Div. 168. |
| Citation | 5 So.2d 644,30 Ala.App. 304 |
| Parties | Moore v. State. |
| Court | Alabama Court of Appeals |
Rehearing Denied Nov. 18, 1941.
Appeal from Circuit Court, Morgan County Seybourn H. Lynne, Judge.
Russell W. Lynne, of Decatur, for appellant.
Thos S. Lawson, Atty. Gen., and Noble J. Russell, Asst. Atty Gen., for the State.
The State relied upon the testimony of the accomplice, Russell in the main, to support the verdict of guilt. Therefore, for the conviction to stand, such testimony must have been corroborated by other evidence tending to connect the defendant with the offense. Code 1940, Title 15, § 307.
The defendant was charged with the larceny of cotton seed. That the seed had been stolen from the warehouse in Decatur Alabama, was not substantially controverted. It was established by the testimony of the accomplice that during the fall and winter of 1940 the seed was stolen from the warehouse by himself and others, and that the defendant would meet him on the highway and drive the truck of cotton seed to Cullman and sell it to a ginner there. Such was the procedure, and upon each trip to Cullman to sell the cotton seed, the defendant and the accomplice, Russell, would, in the early morning, eat at a restaurant in Cullman, the defendant sitting in the front and the accomplice, a negro, having his plate set at the back of the restaurant.
Upon one such excursion to the warehouse in Decatur to steal the cotton seed, the negro was apprehended and placed in jail. Thereafter the arrest of the defendant took place.
The facts and circumstances which were presented upon trial to corroborate this evidence were given by the ginner and the restaurant operator. The ginner testified that the defendant (who lived east of Decatur, in Morgan County) gave as his address Moulton, Route 3 (west of Decatur, Moulton being the county seat of Lawrence County); that defendant always delivered the cotton seed to the gin in the early morning between 6:30 and 7 o'clock, and sometimes was already there, waiting for him, when he (the ginner) arrived. The cafe proprietor testified, as had the accomplice, Russell, that on several occasions, during the period under inquiry, in the early morning, the defendant and this negro, the accomplice witness, or whom he judges to be this same negro, would eat breakfast at the cafe in Cullman, the negro eating at the back where he testified he had, the defendant eating at the front. This witness, the cafe proprietor, further testified, and we appraise this as one of the strongest corroborating facts or circumstances tending to connect defendant with the crime, that, after the negro's arrest, the defendant went to Cullman and told the restaurant proprietor, "met him on the side walk", that this negro, Russell, whom the officers had arrested and brought down to Cullman, was not the boy he had brought with him to the cafe "if anything come up about it." This, to our minds, shows a positive purpose or effort on the part of the defendant, before "anything" had "come up about it", to influence the cafe owner against identifying the accomplice as the negro the defendant had been bringing to Cullman on his various trips to the gin to sell the cotton seed.
The defendant sought to establish his innocence by his testimony that although he had sold about 48 tons of cotton seed to the Cullman gin he had acquired it legally from relatives and others. But, even here, this proof was not so satisfying since, by his witnesses who testified for him, he accounted for only a few tons of cotton seed of his own and that purchased from relatives, the claimed purchases from others not having been testified to by these others or by anyone other than himself.
We think and hold that there was sufficient corroborative evidence of the testimony of the accomplice tending to connect the defendant with the offense to warrant submission of the case to the jury. Whether there be such evidence was a question of law to be determined by the trial court, but its probative force and sufficiency, along with the testimony of...
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...suspicious conduct of the accused may furnish sufficient corroboration of the testimony of the accomplice." Moore v. State, 30 Ala. App. 304, 306, 5 So. 2d 644, 645 (1941). "The requirement for corroboration of an accomplice's testimony cannot be satisfied by the testimony of still other ac......
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