State v. Richards

Citations

• 339 Conn. 628

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of murder, the defendant appealed, and the Appellate Court upheld the defendant's conviction. On the granting of certification, the defendant appealed to this court, claiming that the evidence was insufficient to support his conviction insofar as the state failed to prove the manner, means, place, cause, and time of the victim's death, and that the inferences that the jury apparently drew from the evidence were unreasonable because the state failed to prove that the defendant had committed or intended to commit any criminal acts. Held that the Appellate Court's well reasoned opinion, in which that court determined that the evidence was sufficient to support the defendant's conviction, fully addressed the evidentiary sufficiency issue, and this court adopted that portion of the Appellate Court's opinion as a proper statement of the applicable law concerning that issue; moreover, this court empha- permitted the state to argue in closing argument that defense counsel could have called Velez as a witness, which he contends unconstitutionally ''shifted the burden of proof to the defense . . . [and] dilute[ed] the reasonable doubt standard . . . .'' (Citations omitted.) We reject these arguments because the court properly instructed the jury not to consider defense counsel's speculative missing witness argument and because the state's argument that ''both sides are free to call witnesses'' was not tantamount to arguing that the defense was required to produce evidence of his inno- cence. The court, moreover, instructed the jury that ''[t]he defendant does not have to prove his innocence,'' an instruction that we presume the jury followed. See, e.g., State v. Reynolds, 264 Conn. 1, 131, 836 A.2d 224 (2003) (''[i]n the absence of a showing that the jury failed or declined to follow the court's instructions, we presume that it heeded them''), cert. denied, 541 U.S. 908, 124 S. Ct. 1614, 158 L. Ed. 2d 254 (2004). 20 As with the defendant's first claim,