State v. Jackson

• Citation: 48 A.3d 1059,211 N.J. 394
• Parties: STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff–Respondent and Cross–Appellant, v. Norman JACKSON, Defendant–Appellant and Cross–Respondent.
• Decision Date: 13 August 2012
• Court: United States State Supreme Court (New Jersey)

211 N.J. 394

48 A.3d 1059

STATE of New Jersey, Plaintiff–Respondent and Cross–Appellant,

v.Norman JACKSON, Defendant–Appellant and Cross–Respondent.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Argued March 13, 2012.

Decided Aug. 13, 2012.

Marcia H. Blum, Assistant Deputy Public Defender, argued the cause for appellant and cross-respondent (Joseph E. Krakora, Public Defender, attorney).

Christopher W. Hsieh, Senior Assistant Prosecutor, argued the cause for respondent and cross-appellant (Camelia M. Valdes, Passaic County Prosecutor, attorney; Mr. Hsieh and Steven E. Braun, Chief Assistant Prosecutor, of counsel and on the briefs).

Justice PATTERSON delivered the opinion of the Court.

Stopped at a traffic light during an evening shift, taxi driver Murul Chowdhury was accosted by an uninvited passenger, defendant Norman Jackson. Defendant entered Chowdhury's taxi through the front passenger door, requested a ride, pointed a gun at the driver, and demanded the driver's money. Chowdhury complied, handing over cash and his wallet. Following defendant's orders, Chowdhury drove approximately eight-tenths of a mile with defendant threatening him with a gun. Defendant departed the vehicle without injuring the driver.

Defendant was swiftly arrested. No weapon was found on defendant during an initial pat-down search at the scene of his arrest, and unbeknownst to the arresting officers, defendant was still armed when he was transported to Paterson police headquarters in a police vehicle. At police headquarters, Officer Wayne Bizzaro attempted to conduct a more thorough search of defendant, triggering an altercation that injured defendant and revealing a gun concealed in defendant's underwear. Later that night, Officer Bizzaro drafted a false report that did not reveal the officers' failure to locate defendant's gun at the scene of his arrest. The officer then filed an accurate report of the circumstances of defendant's arrest. He was later subject to administrative discipline for his fabricated initial report.

Before a grand jury, Officer Bizzaro testified falsely based on his initial fabricated report of defendant's arrest, which prompted the State to dismiss the indictment. He later accurately described the arrest before a second grand jury, which indicted defendant for first-degree robbery, N.J.S.A. 2C:15–1, second-degree kidnapping, N.J.S.A. 2C:13–1(b)(1) or (2), and five other charges. Defendant filed a civil suit against Officer Bizzaro for damages allegedly sustained by virtue of the altercation between them and the police officer's false grand jury testimony.

Defendant was tried and convicted by a jury on eight counts of the indictment, including first-degree robbery and second-degree kidnapping. On appeal, defendant challenged his conviction on several grounds, two of which are in contention here. First, defendant contended that the trial court should have granted his motion for a mistrial in the wake of prosecutorial comments about defendant's civil suit and the administrative discipline imposed upon Officer Bizzaro. Second, defendant claimed that the second-degree kidnapping conviction was unsupported by the evidence presented at trial, because the victim was neither transported a “substantial distance” nor confined for a “substantial period,” as required by N.J.S.A. 2C:13–1(b). The Appellate Division panel affirmed defendant's conviction and sentence in all but one respect; it agreed with defendant that the evidence did not support his conviction for kidnapping, and vacated his conviction for that offense. This Court granted the parties' cross-petitions for certification regarding those two issues.

We affirm in part and reverse in part the Appellate Division panel's decision. We concur with the panel that the trial court properly exercised its discretion when it denied defendant's motion for a mistrial. The prosecutor's comments during summation inappropriately touched upon two matters extraneous to the issues considered by the jury—defendant's civil suit against Officer Bizzaro and the officer's administrative discipline. However, those comments referred to evidence that had been admitted during the course of the trial without a defense objection, responded to a defense argument and in one case, concerned evidence that had been elicited by the defense counsel. Moreover, the trial court instructed the jury not to consider other criminal or civil proceedings in its deliberations. Accordingly, we concur with the Appellate Division panel's judgment affirming the trial court's decision to deny a mistrial.

We reverse the panel's determination regarding the trial evidence supporting defendant's kidnapping conviction. We hold that the circumstances of this case support a factfinder's determination that defendant transported Chowdhury a “substantial distance” from the site of their initial encounter, or, in the alternative, that defendant unlawfully confined Chowdhury for a “substantial period,” within the meaning of N.J.S.A. 2C:13–1(b). By forcing Chowdhury to drive through city streets at gunpoint, constrained from abandoning his taxi to summon assistance, defendant kept his victim in a state of isolation and vulnerability that was not merely incidental to the crime of armed robbery. Defendant imposed upon his victim a risk of harm that exceeded the risk of the robbery alone. Accordingly, the jury's determination that defendant violated N.J.S.A. 2C:13–1(b) found sufficient support in the trial evidence, and defendant's conviction for second-degree kidnapping is reinstated.

I.

At about 8:30 p.m. on January 14, 2005, Chowdhury was driving his taxi through Paterson to pick up a customer.¹ He stopped at a light on River Street, and noticed defendant walking near the taxi. Without warning, defendant entered the taxi through the right front door, sat in the passenger seat, and requested a ride to Broadway, one of Paterson's major roads, several blocks south of the taxi's location. Chowdhury, citing his customer waiting for him, offered to take defendant to Broadway after picking up his customer, but defendant demanded twice more that he be driven to Broadway immediately. After the two men briefly argued, defendant pulled out a gun, cautioning Chowdhury to “look at this mother f* * * *r.” Defendant pointed the gun at Chowdhury's chest, and the driver acceded to his passenger's demands and drove in the direction of Broadway:

PROSECUTOR: When did you start driving? Was it before he pulled the gun ou [t], or after he pulled the gun out?

CHOWDHURY: After.

PROSECUTOR: Why did you start to drive?

CHOWDHURY: Because he demanded to go to Broadway.

With his gun pointed at Chowdhury, defendant asked for money.² Chowdhury reached into his pocket and gave defendant sixty-five dollars, the fares he had collected that evening. Defendant then demanded Chowdhury's wallet and Chowdhury complied:

I give it to him, my wallet. He took the money. He give me my wallet back. Then he ask for it again, the wallet. Then he look everything, give it to me back. Then he say, oh, f* * * it. This wallet, I have my fingerprint in there. So, I—from my breath, and I like, wipe. Then he said, okay, put in your pocket. Then I put in my pocket.

Having taken the money, defendant then ordered Chowdhury to drive him through Paterson:

Then he say, okay, start driving. Still driving, then he said, okay, take me to Broadway. And I driving in Straight Street and make a left in like Broadway and Straight Street. Then when I cross the like, [ ] Street, then he says, okay, pull up the car. Then I pull up. Then he say, okay. Don't drive, just park.

Chowdhury pulled the car over, and defendant left the car, instructing Chowdhury to drive away slowly. Based on the start and end locations testified to by Chowdhury, the total distance driven by Chowdhury with defendant in his taxi was .8 miles, representing approximately fifteen city blocks.

Almost immediately, Chowdhury flagged down a police officer, who requested backup. Chowdhury and the officer followed defendant into a park, where they were met by Officer Bizzaro and other police officers, and the group found defendant. After a brief struggle, the officers handcuffed and arrested defendant. They conducted a pat-down search which revealed the money taken from Chowdhury, but no gun. The officers searched the park for the weapon, turning up nothing. At the scene of the arrest, Chowdhury identified defendant as the individual who had threatened and robbed him at gunpoint.

The officers then transported defendant to Paterson police headquarters, and Officer Bizzaro and another officer brought him to an interview room. Officer Bizzaro commenced a more thorough search of defendant. When the officer searched defendant's groin area, defendant resisted the search, and the two punched one another and wrestled. Officer Bizzaro hit defendant with a metal police baton, and when a second officer entered the room, she assisted Officer Bizzaro in subduing defendant. With defendant handcuffed, the officers searched him and found in his underwear a “small caliber silver semi-automatic handgun” that was missing the slide that delivers bullets into the gun's chamber. Following the search, defendant was transported to a hospital, where he received stitches for a cut above his left eye that he had sustained during his altercation with Officer Bizzaro.

Later that night, Officer Bizzaro prepared and filed a report of the incident that contained a material misstatement of the evening's events: it falsely stated that the officers found defendant's weapon at the scene of his arrest. He later testified that he realized that his “negligence” in conducting an incomplete search at the scene of defendant's arrest could have endangered officers' lives, and had resulted in the police transportation of a suspect carrying a gun, albeit a disabled gun. Noting that “there's no excuse,” Officer Bizzaro testified that he “typed up the—the report stating...