Gooch v. State

Appellant, Joseph Paul Gooch, was tried and convicted before a jury in the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County of rape, perverted practice, and the use of a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence. Judge Robert B. Mathias, the presiding judge, imposed sentence as to each conviction, and it is from these judgments that this appeal was seasonably filed.

This sordid incident began, as so many others before it, in a combination bar-nightclub (in this case, Jimmy Combers in Takoma Park, Maryland). The prosecutrix, Cheryl Joanne Stewart, testified that she arrived unaccompanied at the…