State v. Robert B.

Citations

• 200 Conn. App. 637

Syllabus

Convicted of the crimes of unlawful restraint in the first degree and breach of the peace in the second degree in connection with an incident involv- ing his former wife, T, and their two sons, the defendant appealed to this court. He claimed that he was denied his constitutional right to a fair trial and that the trial court erred by not instructing the jury on a certain lesser included offense. Held: 1. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that his rights to due process and a fair trial were violated when T testified on cross-examination as to his prior bad acts and arrests, his claim being unpreserved and not of constitutional magnitude: the claim was not reviewable because the defendant failed to preserve it at trial by either moving to strike the testimony at issue or seeking a curative instruction; moreover, the defen- dant's claim was not of constitutional magnitude, and, therefore, not reviewable under the second prong of State v. Golding (213 Conn. 233), the admission of evidence of a defendant's other crimes being controlled by the law of evidence, not principles of constitutional law. 2. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that he was denied a fair trial due to prosecutorial impropriety in that one of the two prosecutors who represented the state objected during his cross-examination of a witness despite not having conducted the direct examination of that witness, the claimed error having not constituted prosecutorial impropri- ety; our rule of practice (§ 5-4), on which the defendant based his claim, concerns the examination or cross-examination of a single witness by counsel for one party, and there is nothing explicit in the rule regarding whether one counsel alone is required to object to opposing counsel's examination of a witness. 3. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that the trial court erred by failing to instruct the jury on the lesser included offense of unlawful restraint in the second degree, his claim being unprese