Brown v. State

WILNER, Judge.

There are, as we shall see, a number of issues raised in this criminal appeal. The central one is whether'the mere pointing of a handgun by a fleeing felon at a person in pursuit, without any evidence that the gun was loaded, or of a verbalized threat to shoot, or of any attempt to fire the weapon suffices to sustain a conviction for assault with intent to murder. We think it does not.

In the early evening of October 16, 1982, two men, both armed with handguns, entered a Rite-Aid drugstore in Baltimore City. One of them pushed the manager, James Alloway, and one of the cashiers,…