State v. Alexis

Citations

• 194 Conn. App. 162

Syllabus

Convicted of the crimes of robbery in the first degree and threatening in the second degree, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant's conviction stemmed from an incident in which he displayed a semiauto- matic pistol to the victims and stole marijuana from them, dropping his wallet as he fled. Upon receiving a text message from one of the victims, the defendant replied with a text message demanding his wallet and threatening to shoot the victims. On appeal, the defendant claimed, inter alia, that the trial court erred by admitting into evidence a photograph of guns that had been forensically extracted from his cell phone by the police. Held: 1. Even if it was improper for the trial court to admit the photograph into evidence and not give the jury a limiting instruction, the defendant failed to demonstrate that he was harmed thereby, as the alleged error did not substantially affect the verdict; the state's case against the defendant was supported by additional strong evidence, including identifications of the defendant by victims who knew him, and the state presented evidence of text messages that corroborated the victims' version of events, as well as evidence that the police had seized the defendant's wallet from the crime scene. 2. The defendant could not prevail, pursuant to State v. Golding (213 Conn. 233), on his unpreserved claim that the state violated his due process right to a fair trial by eliciting testimony during a witness examination and making a remark during closing arguments about his postarrest and post-Miranda silence; even if a constitutional violation existed, the state established that the alleged constitutional violation was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, as the prosecutor did not focus on the defendant's post-Miranda silence or engage in repetitive references to the defen- dant's silence, the challenged testimony related to the efforts made by the police to locate the firearm, evidence introduced by the state that was unrel