State v. Sweet

Citations

• 214 Conn. App. 679

Syllabus

Convicted, after a jury trial, of the crimes of larceny in the third degree and identify theft in the third degree, and, under a part B information, on a plea of guilty, of being a persistent serious felony offender, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant stole a wallet, belonging to his father, M, and used the credit cards, a debit card and his father's driver's license contained within to make several purchases from various stores, totaling in excess of $2000. On appeal, the defendant claimed, inter alia, that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the defendant had appropriated in excess of $2000 from M to himself and that certain documentary evidence was improperly admitted in violation of the defen- dant's constitutional right to confrontation and the rule against hear- say. Held: 1. The defendant could not prevail on his claim that, because the state presented evidence that M suffered only a loss of credit through the defendant's use of the stolen credit cards and that the state failed to prove that credit is money, the evidence was insufficient to prove that the defendant appropriated in excess of $2000 from M to himself: contrary to the defendant's assumption that the state's theory of the case at trial with respect to the use of the credit cards was that the defendant stole money, the state's theory of the case was that the defendant stole credit from M, and it was sufficient to present evidence of the transactions, the credit card statements posting the transactions and M's efforts to remove those transactions from his credit card statements, and the record clearly demonstrated that the defendant used M's credit cards to purchase items without authorization to do so, those items were charged to M, and M's credit card issuers billed him for those charges, and the defendant failed to provide other facts that the state could have produced to prove that unauthorized use of a credit card results in a taking of credit; moreover, although the cr