Morrison v. State
| Decision Date | 01 September 1993 |
| Docket Number | No. 269,269 |
| Citation | 98 Md.App. 444,633 A.2d 895 |
| Parties | Abras Sandy Q. MORRISON v. STATE of Maryland. , |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Michael R. Braudes, Asst. Public Defender (Stephen E. Harris, Public Defender, on the brief), Baltimore, for appellant.
Sarah E. Page, Asst. Atty. Gen. (J. Joseph Curran, Jr., Atty. Gen., Baltimore and Thomas E. Hickman, State's Atty. for Carroll County, Westminster, on the brief), for appellee.
Submitted before MOYLAN, ALPERT and MURPHY, JJ.
Abras Sandy Q. Morrison, the appellant, was convicted by a jury in the Circuit Court for Carroll County of murder conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, and robbery. He presents four questions on appeal:
I. Did the trial court err in admitting evidence of appellant's financial need?
II. Did the trial court err in admitting hearsay evidence?
III. Did the trial court err in excluding from evidence appellant's proposed Exhibit Number One?
IV. Did the trial court err in denying appellant's motion to suppress a statement to the police?
On or about August 18, 1991, seventy-four-year-old Margaret Cullen was reported to Baltimore City Police as a missing person. In the course of investigating Mrs. Cullen's disappearance, the police also discovered that a brown Cadillac belonging to Mrs. Cullen and her husband was missing from the Cullens' home in Baltimore. Further investigation led police to the home of Troy Shellington.
At 6:30 on the evening of August 24, 1991, the police saw the appellant in the Cullens' car in front of Troy Shellington's home. He pulled the car to the curb, turned the ignition off, and got out of the car. He was in the process of walking away from the car when the police approached him. They asked him whose car it was. He said it belonged to a friend of his, Troy Shellington, who was in the house where the car was parked. The police informed the appellant that the car was reported stolen and that he was under arrest for operating a stolen vehicle. He was handcuffed and transported to police headquarters.
The police also talked with Troy Shellington, who agreed to accompany them to police headquarters. Later that night, Shellington led the police to a cornfield in Carroll County, where the badly decomposed body of Mrs. Cullen was found under a blanket, plastic, and newspapers.
Early the following morning, the police confronted the appellant with what they had found and what Shellington had told them. The appellant made an audiotaped confession concerning the events that led to Mrs. Cullen's death. In that confession (the transcript of which fills twenty typewritten pages), he told the following story.
The appellant, a nursing assistant, met Mrs. Cullen when he went to work for her husband, an elderly dentist, when Dr. Cullen was hospitalized. When Dr. Cullen was released from the hospital in July of 1991, the appellant began working for the Cullens at their home. (Dr. Cullen was later readmitted to the hospital.) Believing that he was "underpaid and overworked" because Mrs. Cullen was paying him less than they had agreed, the appellant quit the job and stole one of Mrs. Cullen's blank checks. He wrote himself a check for $2,000.00, forged Mrs. Cullen's signature, and deposited it in his account. When the forgery was discovered, the appellant was told that criminal charges would be brought against him by the bank if he did not repay the $2,000.00.
The appellant tried to convince Mrs. Cullen to persuade the bank to "drop the charges" against him. He went to her house and knocked on both the front door and the back door, but no one answered. As he was leaving, the police arrived and told him that Mrs. Cullen had reported that he was disturbing her. They told him that if he returned, he would be charged with trespassing.
Early the following morning, the appellant and Shellington (who had also worked briefly for Mrs. Cullen) broke into the Cullens' basement and waited there. When Mrs. Cullen awoke and unlocked the inside door to the basement, the two men grabbed her and tied her to a chair. They had planned to "force" her to drop the charges by having her call the bank. When the scheme did not work out as planned, they decided to take her "out to the country somewhere and just put her there, and just leave her there and by the time she get back to the city, we would have had gone or would have taken care of the $2,000 or hopefully she would have wandered off and got lost somewhere, that's what we were sort of hoping and then come back and then by then, money is paid to the bank and there's pretty much nothing she can say or, or do."
They waited until dark and drove Mrs. Cullen out Reisterstown Road to Carroll County and tried to abandon her in a cornfield. It was very dark, and when the men began to leave, Mrs. Cullen "ran into the knife" that Shellington was holding. They dragged her body back into the field and covered it with a blanket, plastic bags, newspapers, and some brush.
The appellant and Shellington returned to the Cullens' house and took various items including a television, a computer, and jewelry.
Dacia Allmond, the sister of the appellant's girlfriend, testified for the defense concerning the appellant's whereabouts and activities during the week of August 13 through 17 of 1991. During the State's cross-examination of the witness, the following occurred.
The appellant contends that the court erred in admitting that testimony. He claims that the evidence was inadmissible for two independent reasons. First, relying on Vitek v. State, 295 Md. 35, 453 A.2d 514 (1982), he claims that evidence of his need for money was irrelevant and prejudicial. Second, he claims that the line of cross-examination was well beyond the scope of direct examination of the witness, which was limited to the appellant's whereabouts at specific times between the victim's disappearance and the discovery of her body. Assuming, without deciding, that the issue was preserved for our review, we disagree.
The appellant's reliance on Vitek is misplaced. As the Court noted in that case, evidence of an accused's financial situation is admissible under special circumstances that show a nexus between the accused's financial status and the motive for a particular crime. In the instant case, the State presented evidence tending to show that the appellant committed the crimes at issue because he was unable to repay the $2,000.00 he had stolen and was unable to convince the victim to drop the charges. The testimony that the appellant complains about was merely cumulative to the evidence tending to show that the appellant had a particularized motive to commit the crimes in this case.
We also reject the appellant's second claim of error. "[I]n the absence of a showing of prejudice or of abuse, considerable discretion as to whether cross-examination should be permitted to extend beyond the scope of the direct examination is vested in the trial judge." See Marlow, Infant v. Davis, 227 Md. 204, 211, 176 A.2d 215 (1961). See also Oken v. State, 327 Md. 628, 669, 612 A.2d 258 (1992). We perceive no abuse of discretion.
The appellant testified in his own defense. During his cross-examination by the State, the following occurred:
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