State v. Massaro

Citations

• 205 Conn. App. 687

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of the sale of a narcotic substance, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant sold crack cocaine to M, who testified about the drug sale at trial. Prior to trial, M was interviewed and gave a statement to a defense investigator, P, who provided a memorandum containing M's statement to defense counsel. In her state- ment, M indicated that she had possessed narcotics prior to meeting with the defendant and that she provided narcotics to the defendant. The parties agreed prior to trial that the state would not present expert testimony from its witnesses regarding narcotics trafficking. During trial, it was discovered that defense counsel failed to timely disclose P's memorandum. The trial court concluded that P's memorandum was not protected attorney work product and should have been disclosed to the state pursuant to the relevant rule of practice (§ 40-15). The court imposed a sanction on the defense limiting P's testimony and ruled that P's memorandum would not come into evidence. The trial court ordered defense counsel to provide a redacted copy of the memorandum to the prosecutor and to make P available for subsequent questioning. Defense counsel called P as a witness, who testified that M provided narcotics to the defendant on the day of his arrest. Immediately following this testimony, the court provided the jury with a limiting instruction that the testimony was to be used only for the purpose of impeaching M's prior inconsistent statement that she had purchased narcotics from the defendant. During his cross-examination of P, a former law enforcement officer, the prosecutor asked a series of questions regarding the sale and use of drugs. After P had answered these questions, defense counsel objected on the ground that the parties' agreement did not permit opinion testimony regarding the narcotics trade and that P had not been offered as an expert. The court denied defense counsel's motion for a mistrial. The trial court also den