State v. Dabate

Citations

• 351 Conn. 428

Syllabus

Convicted of murder, tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, and making a false statement in connection with the shooting death of his wife and his alleged staging of the crime scene to replicate a home invasion, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant claimed, inter alia, that multiple instances of prosecutorial impropriety deprived him of his right to a fair trial. Held: 351 Conn. 428 MARCH, 2025 429 State v. Dabate Although the defendant established four distinct instances of prosecutorial impropriety, this court concluded that those improprieties did not, either individually or collectively, deprive him of a fair trial. With respect to certain instances in which the prosecutor allegedly did not comply with trial court rulings, the prosecutor did not violate those rulings when he questioned the defendant about his finances and whether he was a ''ticking time bomb,'' but the prosecutor's failure to rephrase his question about whether the defendant was ''trying to create a little mini Cheshire scene'' was improper, as the reference to the word ''Cheshire'' was in direct violation of the court's order not to use that word, and the question was unnecessarily inflammatory because it compared the defendant to other notorious offenders or infamous figures. With respect to certain instances in which the prosecutor allegedly violated State v. Singh (259 Conn. 693) by purportedly asking the defendant to comment on other witnesses' testimony, none of the prosecutor's questions violated Singh because the prosecutor did not ask the defendant to charac- terize another witness' testimony as wrong, mistaken or a lie, or imply to the jury that it must find that the witness had lied in order to find the defendant not guilty; rather, the prosecutor sought to impeach the defen- dant's testimony with inconsistencies in light of other evidence, and the prosecutor's questions were unlikely to confuse the issues and did not shift the state's burden of proof. With re