State v. Tyus

342 Conn. 784
CourtSupreme Court of Connecticut
DecidedApril 12, 2022
DocketSC20462
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 342 Conn. 784 (State v. Tyus) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Connecticut primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Tyus, 342 Conn. 784 (Colo. 2022).

Opinion

*********************************************** The “officially released” date that appears near the be- ginning of each opinion is the date the opinion will be pub- lished in the Connecticut Law Journal or the date it was released as a slip opinion. The operative date for the be- ginning of all time periods for filing postopinion motions and petitions for certification is the “officially released” date appearing in the opinion.

All opinions are subject to modification and technical correction prior to official publication in the Connecticut Reports and Connecticut Appellate Reports. In the event of discrepancies between the advance release version of an opinion and the latest version appearing in the Connecticut Law Journal and subsequently in the Connecticut Reports or Connecticut Appellate Reports, the latest version is to be considered authoritative.

The syllabus and procedural history accompanying the opinion as it appears in the Connecticut Law Journal and bound volumes of official reports are copyrighted by the Secretary of the State, State of Connecticut, and may not be reproduced and distributed without the express written permission of the Commission on Official Legal Publica- tions, Judicial Branch, State of Connecticut. *********************************************** STATE OF CONNECTICUT v. GERJUAN RAINER TYUS (SC 20462) Robinson, C. J., and McDonald, D’Auria, Kahn, Ecker and Keller, Js.

Syllabus

Convicted of the crime of murder in connection with the shooting death of the victim, the defendant appealed. Prior to the shooting, the defendant was involved in a dispute with the victim, after which the victim drove by the defendant’s apartment and shot the defendant, and the defendant fired back at the victim. The defendant’s close friend, A, thereafter stated an intention to seek revenge against the victim. Approximately two weeks later, the victim was shot and killed at a café in New London. In an interview with the police after the victim’s murder, the defendant told them that, on the night of the victim’s murder, he and A had traveled directly from Boston to a nightclub in Norwich located approximately twelve miles away from the café, thereby indicating that he and A were not present at the café at the time of the murder. The defendant and A were subsequently charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder, but the conspiracy charges were dismissed prior to trial. The trial court granted the state’s motion to join the cases against the defen- dant and A for trial. At trial, A’s girlfriend, E, testified that A told her that he had shot someone on the night the victim was killed. Bullet casings from the scene of the shooting at the defendant’s apartment and from the murder scene were submitted to the state forensic laboratory. A ballistics analyst, P, examined the evidence and generated a written report containing his findings. S, who also was employed at the labora- tory, served as a technical reviewer of P’s report. P died before trial and was therefore unavailable to testify. The state subsequently sought to admit testimony from S, and the court denied the defendant’s motion to preclude S’s testimony. The jury found the defendant guilty of murder as a principal or an accessory. The Appellate Court affirmed the defen- dant’s conviction, and the defendant, on the granting of certification, appealed to this court. Held: 1. The Appellate Court correctly concluded that the trial court had not abused its discretion in joining the defendant’s case with A’s case for trial: the state’s case against the defendant and the state’s case against A both arose from the shooting death of the victim, most of the state’s evidence would have been admissible against both the defendant and A if their cases had been tried separately, and the defendant’s and A’s defenses were not antagonistic because each served as the other’s principal alibi witness, the defendant and A both having claimed that they were together at a certain nightclub at the time of the shooting; moreover, the defendant could not prevail on his claim that joinder was improper on the ground that E’s testimony regarding A’s admission that he had shot someone on the night of the victim’s murder could not have been admitted into evidence against the defendant under the coconspira- tor exception to the hearsay rule, because, contrary to the defendant’s claim, that hearsay exception is applicable even in cases, such as the present one, in which the defendant is not facing a conspiracy charge at the time of trial. 2. The defendant could not prevail on his unpreserved claim that the admis- sion into evidence of certain information regarding the location of his cell phone (CSLI) around the time of the victim’s murder violated his fourth amendment rights insofar as the police obtained that information without a warrant: the admission of the defendant’s CSLI was harmless because evidence other than the defendant’s CSLI placed the defendant close to the crime scene at the time of the victim’s murder, including CSLI from the cell phone of A, who maintained at trial that he and the defendant were together the entire evening, and there was additional evidence from which the jury could have inferred that the defendant and A had lied about being at the Norwich nightclub at the time of the murder, including testimony from a witness that he saw the defendant and a man matching A’s description entering that nightclub fifteen to twenty minutes after the witness was told that the victim had been shot; moreover, there was evidence that the defendant and A were driving in a rented silver vehicle on the night of the murder, and witnesses testified that a man matching A’s description ran from the scene of the shooting and entered a vehicle matching the description of the rented vehicle, the defendant’s and A’s DNA were found in that vehicle, and a substance found in the interior of that vehicle possessed genetic characteristics similar to those of the victim. 3. Although the Appellate Court incorrectly concluded that the defendant’s right to confrontation was not violated when the trial court allowed S, an employee of the state forensic laboratory to testify about certain findings made by P, a ballistics analyst with the same laboratory who was unavailable to testify at the defendant’s trial, the admission of S’s testimony was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt: a. The defendant’s constitutional right to confrontation was violated when the trial court allowed S to testify about certain of P’s findings regarding the ballistics evidence in the case, the defendant having been deprived of the opportunity to cross-examine P with respect those find- ings; although S was asked about his own analysis and conclusions in connection with his independent review of the ballistics evidence, S was also asked during direct examination about certain evidence that P had reviewed, and about which P had made findings, but that S had no recollection of reviewing himself, and, because, in those instances, S relied solely on P’s findings rather than his own, the state indirectly communicated P’s findings to the jury through S’s testimony. b.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
342 Conn. 784, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-tyus-conn-2022.