State v. Massaro

Citations

• 347 Conn. 200

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of the sale of a narcotic substance, the defendant appealed. F, a police officer, had observed M and her boyfriend, R, engage in what F believed to be a hand-to-hand narcotic transaction with the defendant. After the transaction, F confronted M and R, and M surrendered the cocaine that she was holding in her hand. M also emptied her purse, which contained drug paraphernalia used to smoke cocaine. At the defendant's trial, M testified that she had bought cocaine from the defendant. On cross-examination, M denied that she told the defense's private investigator, P, that she had provided drugs to the defendant on the day in question. After the state rested its case, defense counsel notified the trial court that he would be calling P to testify regarding M's prior oral inconsistent statement. Defense counsel sought to introduce, but failed to disclose to the state, a memorandum P created after meeting with M months after the alleged drug sale but prior to trial. In that memorandum, P memorialized that, when he interviewed M, she admitted that she had given the defendant drugs. The trial court sanctioned the defendant for the failure to timely disclose the memoran- dum to the state by precluding him from admitting it as evidence. The defendant appealed from the judgment of conviction to the Appellate Court, claiming that the trial court had improperly imposed a discovery sanction precluding the admission of P's memorandum and had improp- erly permitted the prosecutor to elicit expert opinion testimony from P during cross-examination when P had been neither offered nor quali- fied as an expert witness. The Appellate Court concluded that any error was harmless and affirmed the judgment of conviction. On the granting of certification, the defendant appealed to this court. Held: 1. The Appellate Court correctly concluded that the trial court's improper discovery sanction precluding the admission of P's memorandum was harmless: The jury was presented wi