State v. Franqui

Syllabus

Convicted of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, assault in the first degree with a firearm, and criminal possession of a firearm in connection with a drive-by shooting, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant's younger brother, Y, had been driving a vehicle from which the defendant fired gunshots toward another vehicle, killing its driver and wounding a passenger. The victim's girlfriend, O, who was a passenger in the victim's vehicle at the time of the shooting, identified the defendant as the shooter in statements to the police and at trial. On appeal, the defendant claimed, inter alia, that the trial court had committed plain error by failing to instruct the jury on eyewitness identification testimony in accordance with State v. Ledbetter (275 Conn. 534). Held: The trial court's failure to instruct the jury on eyewitness identification testimony in accordance with Ledbetter was not an obvious and readily discernable error requiring reversal under the plain error doctrine because there was no significant risk of misidentification by the primary eyewitness, O, insofar as O was familiar with the defendant, Y, and the vehicle that they occupied at the time of the shooting. This court declined to exercise its supervisory authority over the adminis- tration of justice to require trial courts to provide juries with the relevant portion of the specific eyewitness identification instruction (instruction 2.6- 4) in the Connecticut model criminal jury instructions in any case in which good faith misidentification is at issue, as the defendant's theory of defense concerned O's untruthfulness rather than a good faith misidentification, and mandating such an instruction in all cases in which identification might conceivably be at issue could cause confusion among jurors. For the reasons set forth in State v. Franqui (354 Conn. 400), the compan- ion decision resolving the same claim in Y's appeal, this court declined to exercise its supervisory authority to abroga