State v. Pernell

Citations

• 194 Conn. App. 394

Syllabus

Convicted, after a jury trial, of the crime of murder in connection with the shooting death of the victim, the defendant appealed. At trial, the defendant testified, inter alia, that he and the victim were smoking phencyclidine in his bedroom while the victim exchanged a series of phone calls with her mother to arrange for a ride to work. The defendant further testified that a heated conversation ensued between the victim and her mother, that the victim subsequently took a gun from the defen- dant's closet and put the gun to her head, and that the gun went off when the defendant tried to take it from the victim. On appeal, the defendant claimed that he was deprived of his due process right to a fair trial because of certain prosecutorial improprieties in closing argument. Held: 1. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that the prosecutor improp- erly opined on how someone should act during a police interview because there was no evidence as to how a grieving person typically would respond when questioned by the police hours after witnessing his friend's death, nor about how the defendant's ingestion of phencyclidine could have affected his behavior during the police interview; the prosecu- tor, who merely asked the jurors to consider the defendant's demeanor during the police interview and argued the inference that he was calm during that interview, properly prompted the jurors to employ their common sense in considering the evidence, and he simply observed that the defendant was calm and calculating at the time of the police interview, which the jurors reasonably could have inferred from the video of the police interview that was entered into evidence. 2. The defendant's claim that the prosecutor improperly interjected his own experience by stating what he would have done if he had found himself in the defendant's circumstances was unavailing; the challenged com- ment of the prosecutor was not an improper personal anecdote and was based squarely on the evide