People v. Fields

• Decision Date: 15 October 2001
• Citation: People v. Fields, 287 AD2d 577, 731 N.Y.S.2d 492 (N.Y. App. Div. 2001)
• Parties: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Respondent,<BR>v.<BR>HASSAN FIELDS, Appellant.
• Court: New York Supreme Court — Appellate Division

287 A.D.2d 577

731 N.Y.S.2d 492

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Respondent,

v.HASSAN FIELDS, Appellant.

Decided October 15, 2001.

Altman, J. P., Florio, Schmidt and Cozier, JJ., concur.

Ordered that the judgment and the order are affirmed.

At trial, there was testimony that on April 30, 1997, the defendant, his codefendants Allan Marshall and Kevin Grant, and an individual named Germaine Williams tracked down two men the defendant had altercations with earlier that day.Upon locating the two men on a residential street, the defendant, Marshall, Grant, and Williams exited a vehicle and fired handguns at them.

The defendant contends that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel at both the trial and the sentencing, in that the defense counsel failed to move to suppress physical evidence seized from the apartment of the defendant's girlfriend pursuant to a search warrant, and failed to request that the court consider youthful offender treatment for him.However, the failure of the defense counsel to make a pre-trial motion to suppress, in and of itself, does not constitute ineffective assistance of counsel(see, People v Rivera,71 NY2d 705, 709;People v Donovan,184 AD2d 654, 655).Under these circumstances, the defense counsel's failure to so move cannot be deemed to be ineffective assistance of counsel(see, People v Cabo,228 AD2d 689;People v Harris,242 AD2d 470;People v Sullivan,153 AD2d 223).

The defendant's contention that his counsel was ineffective because he failed to seek youthful offender treatment is also without merit.Since the jury convicted the defendant of two armed felonies, he was not an "eligible youth" unless the sentencing court found "mitigating circumstances that bear directly upon the manner in which the crime was committed," or else found that the defendant's participation in the incident was "relatively minor"(CPL 720.10 [3][i], [ii]).There were no mitigating circumstances, and the defendant's participation in the incident was not relatively minor.

The defendant also contends that the court erred in admitting letters allegedly written by him and addressed to Marshall at the Orange County Jail as evidence of his guilt.CPLR 4536 authorizes the "[c]omparison of a disputed writing with any writing proved to the satisfaction of the court to be the handwriting of the person claimed to have made the disputed writing."Once a court determines the genuineness of a handwriting specimen, an expert or a jury may compare a disputed writing to the known specimen, even in the absence of an expert opinion (see, People v Molineux,168 NY 264, 330;People v Hunter,34 NY2d 432, 435-436).The prosecution's handwriting expert testified on direct examination that the defendant probably wrote the letters, since the letters exhibited similar characteristics which evidenced a probable common authorship based upon his comparison with handwriting samples submitted by the defendant.

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