Owens v. State (1992)

In Owens v. State, 93 Md. App. 162, 611 A.2d 1043 (1992), the conundrum to be solved by circumstantial evidence was a bit different. "The circumstance is that a suspect was found behind the wheel of an automobile parked on a private driveway at night with the lights on and with the motor running. Although there are many far-fetched and speculative hypotheses that might be conjured up (but which require no affirmative elimination), there are only two unstrained and likely inferences that could reasonably arise. One is that the vehicle and its driver had arrived at the driveway from somewhere else. The other is that the driver had gotten into and started up the vehicle and was about to depart for somewhere else." 93 Md. App. at 163. The defendant behind the wheel was indisputably drunk. But had he been driving? If the man in the driveway had arrived from somewhere else, he had been driving and was guilty. If, on the other hand, he was about to depart for somewhere else, he had not yet been driving and was not guilty. The Court needed a circumstantial tiebreaker. Several possibilities for tiebreakers floundered because of the failure of the State to have presented readily available evidence. As we sought "to break the tie between whether the appellant had not yet left home or was already abroad upon the town," 93 Md. App. at 167, the initial complaint that brought the police officer to the scene was found to have had circumstantial significance: "Without anything further as to its contents being revealed, it was nonetheless in evidence that the thing that had brought Trooper Cottman to the scene was a complaint about a suspicious vehicle. The inference is reasonable that the vehicle had been driving in some sort of erratic fashion. Had the appellant simply been sitting, with his motor idling, on the driveway of his own residence, it is not likely that someone from the immediate vicinity would have found suspicious the presence of a familiar neighbor in a familiar car sitting in his own driveway. The call to the police, even without more being shown, inferentially augurs more than that. It does not prove guilt in and of itself. It simply makes one of two alternative inferences less reasonable and its alternative inference thereby more reasonable." Id.