People v. Breland

• Decision Date: 08 March 1993
• Citation: 191 A.D.2d 500,594 N.Y.S.2d 789
• Parties: The PEOPLE, etc., Respondent, v. Victor BRELAND, Appellant.
• Court: New York Supreme Court — Appellate Division

Page 789

594 N.Y.S.2d 789

191 A.D.2d 500

The PEOPLE, etc., Respondent, v. Victor BRELAND, Appellant.

Supreme Court, Appellate Division Second Department.

March 8, 1993.

Richard L. Herzfeld, New York City, for appellant.

Charles J. Hynes, Dist. Atty., Brooklyn (Roseann B. MacKechnie, Ann Bordley, and Victor Barall, of counsel), for respondent.

Before BRACKEN, J.P., and BALLETTA, O'BRIEN and RITTER, JJ.

MEMORANDUM BY THE COURT.

Appeal by the defendant from a judgment of the Supreme Court, Kings County (Aiello, J.), rendered July 11, 1990, convicting him of enterprise corruption, murder in the second degree (six counts), attempted murder in the second degree, assault in the first degree, and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree (four counts), upon a jury verdict, and imposing sentence.

ORDERED that the judgment is affirmed.

The indictment charged that in 1987 and 1988, the defendant was a member of a criminal enterprise engaged in the purchase, preparation, packaging, and sale of crack cocaine at various retail locations in the East New York, Brownsville, and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. Violence was routinely used against rival drug enterprises, against the organization's own employees (e.g., for stealing drugs or money from the business), and against innocent bystanders who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Among the shootings with which the defendant was charged were: the murders on March 31, 1988, of Shirley Bibbs and James Hamilton, Sr., inside a beauty parlor called Glamorama, which was allegedly owned by rival drug dealer, James Hamilton, Jr., and the subsequent shooting outside Glamorama of his own accomplice, Willie Ashton, and the murder on April 6, 1988 of Joseph Lovell, in whose name the criminal enterprise registered some of its cars, including two of the cars used in the Glamorama slayings, which the defendant feared would be traced to Lovell, whom he did not trust.

The defendant's participation in the Glamorama massacre was adequately corroborated by nonaccomplice testimony "tending to connect" the defendant with the murders of Bibbs and Hamilton. The trial court correctly ruled that erstwhile collaborator Willie Ashton was not an accomplice in his own shooting outside Glamorama, with the result that Ashton's testimony regarding his own attempted murder was sufficient to corroborate the accomplice testimony of Gladden and Easterling that the defendant had only moments before used the same weapon inside the beauty parlor to kill Bibbs and Hamilton (see, People v. Moses, 63 N.Y.2d 299, 482 N.Y.S.2d 228, 472 N.E.2d 4; People v. Hudson, 51 N.Y.2d 233, 433 N.Y.S.2d 1004, 414 N.E.2d 385; People v. Deitsch, 237 N.Y. 300, 142 N.E. 670; cf., People v. Wasserman, 46 A.D.2d 915, 362 N.Y.S.2d 868).

Similarly, Ashton's testimony about his own shooting was nonaccomplice testimony which corroborated various accomplice accounts that the defendant murdered Joseph Lovell, in whose name several of the mob's cars were registered, and who was suspected of being...