Crenshaw v. Commissioner of Correction

Citations

• 215 Conn. App. 207

Syllabus

The petitioner, who had been convicted of the murder, assault and kidnap- ping of the victim, sought a writ of habeas corpus. He claimed that his trial counsel, M, rendered deficient performance by failing to present a specific theory of defense to establish that the petitioner lacked the intent to cause the victim's death. The petitioner had driven to a nail salon parking lot where he met the victim, whom he had recently begun dating. The petitioner punched the victim in the face as she entered his car and punched her in the face a second time as they drove away. F, who was in his car in the parking lot at the time, witnessed both punches. The petitioner later gave the police a statement in which he admitted that he would choke the victim when he became angry. A state medical examiner, C, concluded that the victim had been strangled and had suffered blunt force trauma to her head and neck but was unable to say whether the head injury or strangulation caused her death. C stated that a person with the victim's strangulation injury could have survived and that it was possible that the victim did not lose consciousness immediately after the infliction of the head injury but could have survived for up to ten hours. At the habeas trial, the state's chief medical examiner, G, agreed with C as to the cause and manner of the victim's death but could not rule out the possibility that her head injuries were caused by later trauma to the same area of the head. Although M testified that his strategy was to present a cohesive defense that accounted for all of the evidence and showed that the petitioner lacked the intent to kill regardless of which injury caused the victim's death, the petitioner claimed that M rendered deficient representation because the only rea- sonable strategy was to advocate that the two punches were the cause of death insofar as they created a temporal distance between the fatal act and the victim's death that he could have relied on to demonstrate lack o