State v. Hazard

Citations

• 201 Conn. App. 46

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of robbery in the first degree, the defendant appealed, claiming, inter alia, that the evidence was insufficient to establish his identity as the perpetrator and that he proved his affirmative defense of inoperability of the weapon used during the robbery. The perpetrator had pointed a gun at the employee on duty at a storage facility, took cash from her and then fled. Police officers searching the nearby area encountered a vehicle that came toward them but then reversed direction and left the area before crashing in a yard. The defendant fled from the crash scene before the police arrived and found cash, a gun and other items in the vehicle, which had been lent to the defendant by his girlfriend hours before the robbery. The storage facility employee described to the police what the defendant was wearing but was unable to identify him when the police brought her to a nearby store where he was arrested shortly after the robbery for a one-on-one identification. Held: 1. There was sufficient evidence from which the jury reasonably could have found that the defendant was the person who robbed the storage facility; the defendant owned and wore clothing and items similar to that worn by the perpetrator, some of which the police found in bushes near the crime scene and which contained the defendant's DNA, video surveil- lance showed an individual driving to a bush in a vehicle matching that which was owned by the defendant's girlfriend, exiting the vehicle and retreating behind the bush before returning to the vehicle wearing cloth- ing that matched that of the defendant at the time of his arrest, and the police found in the vehicle, which belonged to the defendant's girlfriend, a gun and money that approximated the amount stolen from the stor- age facility. 2. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that his conviction of first degree robbery should be reversed because he proved the affirmative defense that the gun was inoperable at the time o