State v. Capasso

Citations

• 203 Conn. App. 333

Syllabus

Convicted, after a jury trial, of the crimes of reckless burning and false reporting of an incident in the second degree, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant, who previously had been living in China for more than a decade, and his wife and two children were temporarily living with his parents. The defendant and his family intended to return to China but were having difficulty obtaining certain travel documenta- tion. As a result, the defendant devised a plan that he hoped would expedite that documentation, whereby he sought to leverage one Chi- nese agency against another by making it appear that the Chinese govern- ment had attempted to intimidate him and his family by entering his parents' house and starting a fire. To effectuate this plan, the defendant spread an accelerant, Sterno, a flammable, fire starting gel, throughout the house while his parents, wife, and children were sleeping. The defendant then lit a candle and used it to burn a sheet for thirty to sixty seconds. After extinguishing the fire, the defendant awakened his parents and told them that he had heard someone in the house and that the person had spread accelerant and started a fire. His father then called 911. On appeal, the defendant claimed that the evidence was insufficient to support his conviction of reckless burning and that the trial court erred in denying his motion to set aside the verdict because his conviction of reckless burning was against the manifest weight of the evidence. Specifically, the defendant claimed that the state failed to present sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he recklessly endangered the building ''of another'' as required by the reckless burning statute (§ 53a-114 (a)) and that his conviction was against the manifest weight of the evidence because his behavior was not reckless. Held: 1. The evidence was sufficient to support the defendant's conviction of reckless burning: the jury reasonably could have concluded beyond a r