State v. Tony O.

Syllabus

Convicted, after a jury trial, of various crimes in connection with an alterca- tion with his wife, W, the defendant appealed to this court. The defendant had gone to the gas station where W was employed to obtain from her the keys to his truck so that he could get tools he needed for work that were stored in the truck. When he walked around the front counter toward W and reached toward her handbag that was on a counter behind her, she pushed him away, and a physical encounter ensued between them during which she sustained injuries and thereafter was treated at a hospital. S, a customer at the store, witnessed part of the altercation and attempted to break it up. W told a police officer, who arrived minutes after the defendant left the gas station, that the defendant had attacked her. At trial, the police officer testified to that statement, and the defen- dant objected. The trial court overruled the objection and admitted the statement into evidence as a spontaneous utterance under the applicable provision (§ 8-3 (2)) of the Connecticut Code of Evidence. On appeal, the defendant claimed, inter alia, that the evidence was insufficient to support his conviction of the charges of robbery and unlawful restraint, and that the trial court improperly admitted W's statement to the police officer. Held: 1. Although the evidence was sufficient to support the defendant's conviction of unlawful restraint in the first degree, there was insufficient evidence to support the jury's necessary finding that he seized W's handbag in the course of committing a larceny, as required to convict him of robbery in the third degree: a. The jury had no reasonable basis for finding that the defendant's brief taking of the handbag was accompanied by a felonious intent to steal and deprive W of it permanently: although the jury was entitled to reject the defendant's testimony that his only purpose in seizing the handbag was to search it for the keys to the truck, the jury was not entitled to dra