State v. Gordon

Citations

• 206 Conn. App. 70

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of larceny of an elderly person by embezzlement in the second degree in connection with certain credit card transactions, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant was a health care aide who lived part-time with the alleged victim, R, and his wife. Eventu- ally, the defendant and R became romantic and intimate. R gave the defendant large sums of money, and, according to the defendant, author- ized the use of his credit card to make purchases for the defendant's own personal needs. After R's health declined, his son, B, hired a book- keeper to help R manage his finances. When the bookkeeper found certain credit card charges and checks written to the defendant, the defendant's employment was terminated. B filed a complaint with the police, who conducted a larceny investigation, during which a detective, S, interviewed R. Prior to trial, R died, and the court granted a motion in limine filed by the defendant to preclude the admission of statements made by R to any law enforcement agent. At trial, S testified that he met with R and that R consented to the investigation. On appeal, the defendant claimed that the trial court improperly admitted into evidence a testimonial hearsay statement of R in violation of her constitutional right to confrontation and that she was deprived of her due process rights when the prosecutor engaged in prosecutorial impropriety by making substantive use of the testimonial hearsay statement in her closing rebuttal argument. Held: 1. The trial court violated the defendant's right to confrontation under the federal constitution by admitting into evidence, without limitation, S's testimony that R consented to the larceny investigation, which consti- tuted hearsay: R's consent to the larceny investigation was an out-of- court statement, and, although S did not repeat any of the specific words that R spoke during his interview with S, S's testimony presented to the jury, by implication, the substance of R's stateme