State v. Abdulaziz

Citations

• 231 Conn. App. 789

Syllabus

Convicted, after a trial to the court, of the crime of health insurance fraud as a result of billing requests he submitted to the Department of Social Services for face-to-face counseling sessions he claimed to have had with clients on 114 separate occasions in their homes in Connecticut while he was in Texas, the defendant appealed. In sentencing the defendant, the court determined that the value of the funds he wrongfully obtained had some value that could not be satisfactorily ascertained and thus set that value at $50 or less pursuant to statute (§ 53a-121 (a) (3)). The court further determined that the defendant's conviction thus constituted a crime of the same grade or degree as larceny in the sixth degree, a class C misdemeanor, and imposed a suspended term of three months of incarceration and eighteen months of probation with special conditions. The court thereafter granted in part the state's motion to correct an illegal sentence and reduced the defendant's probationary term to one year, the maximum period of probation for a conviction of a class C misdemeanor pursuant to statute (§ 53a-29 (d) (4)). The defendant claimed, inter alia, that his rights to due process were violated because the court was required to acquit him on the health insurance fraud charge after having found him not guilty of larceny in the first degree by defrauding a public community in violation of statute ((Rev. to 2017) § 53a-122 (a) (4)). Held: The trial court did not violate the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy when it corrected the defendant's sentence and resentenced him to a lesser term of probation. Although the trial court found that the state had failed to prove that the value of the funds the defendant wrongfully obtained exceeded the $2000 necessary to convict him on the larceny charge, the court did not, as the defendant claimed, reverse its decision on the value element of that charge in ruling on the motion to correct an illegal sentence but, rather, re