State v. Gomes

Citations

• 193 Conn. App. 79

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of assault in the second degree in connection with his conduct in hitting the victim in the head with a bottle, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant and another individual, M, had been fighting in a bar as a result of offensive remarks that M made to the defendant's girlfriend. After security guards separated the defendant and M, the victim asked M why he was fighting, and the defendant struck the victim with the bottle. On appeal, the defendant claimed that the trial court deprived him of his right to present a defense of investigative inadequacy when it omitted from its instructions to the jury certain language in his written request to charge that pertained to the police investigation into the incident as it might relate to weaknesses in the state's case. The defendant claimed that without the inclusion of the language he requested, the jury would not have understood how to use the evidence he elicited at trial about the inadequacies of the police investigation. Held that the trial court did not mislead the jury or violate the defendant's right to present a defense by omitting the requested language from its instructions: that court's jury charge was identical to the model jury instruction provided on the Judicial Branch website and was in keeping with long-standing Connecticut law, nearly identical instructions have been upheld by our Supreme Court, the defendant presented his evidence to the jury and cross-examined the state's wit- nesses regarding the alleged inadequacy of the police investigation, and the court did not direct the jury to disregard that evidence or argument, and specifically instructed the jury to consider all of the evidence before it; moreover, the court, in its charge on investigative inadequacy, repeated to the jury its responsibility to determine whether the state, in light of all the evidence, had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty of the count with which he was charged. A