Greer v. State

Citations

• 224 Conn. App. 1

Syllabus

The petitioner, who had previously been convicted of four counts of the crime of risk of injury to a child, sought a new trial on the basis of allegedly newly discovered evidence that, if credited by a jury, would support a finding that he was innocent of the charges against him. The petitioner was a rabbi, dean and teacher at a private, Orthodox Jewish school when he sexually abused the victim, E, a student at the school, on various dates in 2002 and 2003, when E was fourteen and fifteen years old. The purported new evidence came to light as a result of testimony given by H, a rabbi and an assistant dean at the school when E attended, during a deposition in a federal civil lawsuit that E had brought against the petitioner. H testified in his deposition that he had had a sexual relationship with the petitioner that started when H himself was a student at the school. H also testified that he was involved in a sexual relationship with the petitioner at the same time that the peti- tioner was abusing E. The petitioner argued that H's testimony at a new trial would establish with certainty that any sexual misconduct by the petitioner toward E could not have begun until after E's sixteenth birth- day. It was an essential element of the crime for which the petitioner had been convicted, risk of injury to a child under the applicable statute (§ 53-21 (a) (2)), that E had been under the age of sixteen at the time of the petitioner's sexual misconduct. The petitioner attached to his petition for a new trial an affidavit sworn by H that stated, to H's knowledge, no acts of misconduct by the petitioner toward E occurred prior to E's sixteenth birthday. At the trial on the petition, H testified, inter alia, that E had called him sometime during the winter of 2020 to 2021 to ask if he had been ''really under sixteen at the time.'' The court denied the petition for a new trial and, in its memorandum of decision, noted that the petitioner's defense strategy had changed since his c