People v. Meile

[57]

THOMPSON (IRA F.), J.

The defendants were charged by information filed by the district attorney of Los Angeles County with the crime of robbery. The jury returned a verdict of guilty against the defendant William Dyer, who prosecutes this appeal from the judgment and from an order denying his motion for a new trial. The defendant Meile was found not guilty.

That a robbery was committed is not in dispute. On the second day of April, 1928, W. L. Rowley and Mr. Donuer, employees of the Pan-American Petroleum Company, started to go to the bank for the purpose of depositing the day’s receipts. They had just put a suitcase into the rear of a Ford roadster and a similar bag into the driver’s compartment when they were held up at the point of a revolver by two men who had alighted from an old Cadillac touring car which had been driven into the yard by a third man. These men made away with somewhere between ten thousand dollars and twelve thousand dollars n cash and about nine thousand dollars in checks. Meile was identified by the witness Rowley, the cashier of the oil company, who was a man about forty years of age. He, however, could not identify the appellant. The other employee, a young man of twenty years, identified the appellant as the one who was on his side of the Ford, and said that the defendant Meile resembled the man who was on the other side, although he only got a fleeting glimpse of the latter robber. On cross-examination this witness testified that when the appellant approached him, he did so “on a bind of a half run and a half fast walk” crouched, with a tweed cap “flopped down over his face” to about the bridge of his nose, so that he could not see or describe the upper part of his head. Also the witness testified that while he was being held up his back was to Dyer, but that when the latter returned to the Cadillac, which was not over fifteen feet away, the latter ran sideways with his head twisted,

watching;

that he, the witness, observed him during this return. About a month and a half after the robbery the witness was shown about twenty photographs, among which there were two which resembled the appellant, one a front view and the other a profile, and he was not “sure which was the right-man.” Some time after the witness saw the pictures, the