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Jeffries v. State1/29/1997
late. Neither Judge Beard nor we are authorized to overlook the ten-day filing deadline and to consider the motion's merits, even were we disposed to do so. (We are not.) For that reason alone, the appellant's first contention must fail.
The rest is dicta. We add these further and gratuitous observations in order to stress the point that the procedural flaw in the appellant's first contention that forecloses any consideration of its merits has not produced a hard case of outraged innocence. The appellant was convicted of first-degree felony-murder and he was guilty of first-degree felony-murder. The trial evidence abundantly supported that verdict in a variety of ways. The evidence was legally sufficient to have permitted a juror reasonably to have found that the murder of Daniel Huston occurred as the result of the appellant's perpetration of 1) the robbery of Daniel Huston's automobile, 2) the attempted robbery of that automobile, 3) the kidnapping of Daniel Huston (he was forced at gunpoint to lie down in the back of the automobile, presumably in preparation for its being driven away), 4) the attempted kidnapping of Daniel Huston, 5) the kidnapping of Heather McDonald, or 6) the attempted kidnapping of Heather McDonald. It would, moreover, be hard to overturn, on legal insufficiency grounds, a finding that the bullet that killed Daniel Huston was part of a fusillade of bullets fired in the course of 7) the maiming or 8) the attempted maiming of Heather McDonald (eight gunshot wounds, including two in the left side of her face and three in the side of her neck). In actual fact and quite aside from carjacking, the appellant was guilty of first-degree felony-murder--squared and cubed. Other than to make a distinction between premeditated murder and felony-murder, a practice which is encouraged but not required, no more particularized parsing of the jury's decisional process has ever even been suggested. State v. Frye, 283 Md. 709, 721-25, 393 A.2d 1372 (1978). See also Oken v. State, 327 Md. 628, 665-67, 612 A.2d 258 (1992). The fact that the jury may have been invited to consider one rationale rather than six or eight other readily available rationales hardly produced a case of outraged innocence. In the jury's verdict of felony-murder, justice was done.
Under the circumstances of this case, moreover, the premature inclusion of carjacking in the felony-murder catalogue actually added nothing to the list of first-degree rationales. But for a slight and arcane difference in their respective animi furandi, an esoteric nuance not remotely involved in the circumstances of this case, carjacking is but a particularized instance of the broader crime of robbery. As a practical matter and as far as the circumstances of this case were concerned, the carjacking was simply the robbery of Daniel Huston's automobile, as opposed to a more generic robbery of his wallet or of his watch. "A rose by any other name. . . ." As a purely abstract matter, the instruction may have been academically flawed. That issue, however, has been neither preserved nor presented. Nor has justice in its larger sense been damaged or offended, let alone outraged.
3. The Denial of the Motion: Conclusion
Affirming the denial of the appellant's "Motion" was easy. The difficulty was in identifying precisely what it was that was properly denied. In the last analysis, the appellant had no complaint with the charging document. In the last analysis, the appellant had no complaint with the evidence against him on the charge of murder. The appellant's real objection, though he never clearly stated it as such, was to an erroneous instruction, to which he never objected at trial and which in the circumstances of this case
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