State v. Grant
| Decision Date | 22 April 2008 |
| Docket Number | No. 18005.,18005. |
| Court | Connecticut Supreme Court |
| Parties | STATE of Connecticut v. Edward R. GRANT. |
Kent Drager, senior assistant public defender, for the appellant (defendant).
Timothy J. Sugrue, senior assistant state's attorney, with whom, on the brief, were Michael Dearington, state's attorney, and James G. Clark and Gary Nicholson, senior assistant state's attorneys, for the appellee (state).
ROGERS, C.J., and NORCOTT, PALMER, VERTEFEUILLE and ZARELLA, Js.
The defendant, Edward R. Grant, was convicted, after a jury trial, on charges of murder in violation of General Statutes § 53a-54a.1 The trial court rendered judgment in accordance with the verdict and the defendant appealed to this court pursuant to General Statutes § 51-199(b)(3). The defendant claims on appeal that the trial court improperly: (1) denied his motion to suppress certain evidence seized as the result of a search warrant that the defendant claims was issued without a showing of probable cause in violation of his rights under the fourth amendment to the United States constitution;2 (2) concluded that the state had not intentionally or recklessly omitted material facts from the search warrant and denied the defendant's motion for a hearing pursuant to Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 98 S.Ct. 2674, 57 L.Ed.2d 667 (1978); (3) denied the defendant's motion to suppress certain statements made by the defendant on the ground that the statements were the result of an unlawful custodial interrogation in violation of his rights under the fifth amendment to the United States constitution;3 and (4) admitted testimony by several witnesses that they had observed bloodstains at the scene of the murder. The defendant further claims that the state engaged in prosecutorial impropriety during closing arguments thereby depriving him of his due process right to a fair trial. We affirm the judgment of the trial court.
The jury reasonably could have found the following facts. On the morning of July 16, 1973, Timothy Woodstock and Frederick Petzold III, sixteen year old cousins, parked their vehicle on the eighth level of the Temple Street parking garage (garage) in New Haven and went shopping. They returned to the garage shortly before 1 p.m. As they were about to get in their vehicle, they saw a man chasing a woman on level nine of the garage. The man was trying to grab the woman and the woman let out "one long scream...." The man and woman disappeared from sight behind an elevator shaft. Several seconds later, Woodstock saw the man running back to a blue Buick Electra (Buick) that had been parked on level nine. He was carrying in his hand a shiny object, five to six inches long. Petzold walked up to level nine of the garage and then up to level ten to investigate, but saw nothing amiss. Petzold and Woodstock then left the garage.
Jane Merold, Gary Hyrb and Ivan Hodes, who worked near the garage, had taken a lunch break together on the tenth level. At the end of their break, at about 1 p.m., they started to walk down to level nine. They saw a blue car, which Merold later identified as the Buick speeding toward them on level nine. The car passed them and went up to level ten.
At 1:01 p.m., a man drove up to the exit booth on the floor level of the garage and, with his right hand, handed a bloody parking ticket to the attendant, Christopher Fagan. Fagan described the car that the man was driving as a green or blue Chrysler or General Motors vehicle. It appeared to Fagan that the man might have injured his left hand. The man appeared to be upset and Fagan asked him if he needed assistance. The man said "no thank" in what sounded to Fagan like a foreign accent. After he paid the parking fee and accepted the change with his right hand, the man drove away.
At about 1 p.m, William Wyant, an employee of the New Haven Parking Authority, discovered the body of the victim, twenty-two year old Concetta Serra, in a stairwell on level nine of the garage. Wyant ran to an office on the third level of the garage and directed a coworker to call the police. Several members of the New Haven police department responded to the call. They arranged for the victim's body to be sent to Yale-New Haven Hospital and an autopsy was performed that afternoon. It was determined that the victim had bled to death as the result of a single stab wound to her chest. The victim also had a cut on her finger and several bruises and abrasions on her right temple, right forehead, right knee and left ankle. The victim had type A blood.
As the police were investigating the crime scene that afternoon, Hyrb, who had heard about the murder, approached them and led them to the Buick on the eighth level of the garage where he had seen the driver abandon it. It was later determined that the victim had driven to the garage in the Buick, which was owned by her father. There was blood on the exterior driver's side door, window and door handle and on the interior of the car near the left side of the driver's seat. A box of tissues located in the footwell directly behind the driver's seat also had blood on it. Blood also was present on the concrete floor of the garage next to the driver's side of the car and a trail of blood drops led away from the car down to the fifth level of the garage and then back up to a parking area on the seventh level. The police found the keys to the Buick and a man's white handkerchief, both bloodied, near the end of the blood trail. Testing of several blood samples taken from the handkerchief, the interior and exterior of the victim's car and the blood trail revealed that the blood was type 0 human blood. In 1988, a type of DNA testing referred to as DQ Alpha was performed on a sample of blood taken from the interior of the victim's car. The tests revealed that the blood had a DQ Alpha type of 1.2, 3. Approximately 5 percent of the general population has type O blood with a DQ Alpha type of 1.2, 3.
The police were able to obtain a fingerprint from the tissue box found in the victim's car. After comparing the fingerprint to the approximately 70,000 fingerprints on file with the New Haven police department in 1973, investigators were unable to locate a match. In 1983, Henry C. Lee, then the chief criminalist at the state police forensic laboratory (forensic laboratory), determined that blood had been deposited on top of the fingerprint on the tissue box and concluded that the fingerprint had been placed before the blood had been deposited. There was no way, however, for Lee to determine the interval between the placement of the fingerprint and the deposit of the blood. They could have been deposited within the same second or months apart.
Christopher Grice, a criminalist in the fingerprint section of the forensic laboratory, became involved in the investigation into the victim's murder in 1983. From that time until 1997, he attempted on numerous occasions to identify the tissue box fingerprint by comparing it to fingerprints of known origin. In 1997, by using a computer program known as the automated fingerprint identification system, Grice finally was able to match the tissue box fingerprint to the defendant's left thumbprint.4
Thereafter, Gerald Hanahan, an inspector with the state division of criminal justice, met with the defendant at the defendant's place of work and informed him that his fingerprint had been found at the scene of a crime that had been committed in New Haven twenty-five years earlier. Hanahan asked the defendant if he had spent any time in New Haven during that period and if he knew the victim or her family. The defendant told Hanahan that he went to New Haven occasionally on business but did not know the victim or her family. The defendant also told Hanahan that he had type O blood. Hanahan met with the defendant again the next day and asked him if he could explain the presence of his fingerprint on the tissue box. The defendant stated that he did not know why his fingerprint had been found there and that he had memory problems resulting from a head injury that he had received in the 1960s while in the military and medication prescribed for the injury. Thereafter, Hanahan obtained and executed a search warrant for a sample of the defendant's blood. The blood sample taken from the defendant was type O and had a DQ Alpha type of 1.2, 3, the same type as the blood that had been found at the crime scene.
Thereafter, the defendant was arrested and charged with the victim's murder. After the defendant's arrest the forensic laboratory performed DNA testing on several cuttings taken from the handkerchief that had been found at the crime scene.5 One sample had a DNA profile that matched the defendant's. There was no way to determine whether the DNA had come from the blood on the handkerchief or from some other biological source such as skin cells. The expected frequency of this DNA profile in the general population was between one in 300 million and one in 6.9 trillion. A type of paint used primarily in aftermarket automotive applications also was discovered on a sample of material taken from the handkerchief. At the time of the murder, the defendant had worked as a vehicle painter in an autobody repair shop owned by his parents.
After a jury trial, the defendant was convicted of murder. This appeal followed. On appeal, the defendant claims that the trial court improperly: (1) denied his motion to suppress all evidence derived from the execution of the search warrant for a sample of the defendant's blood on the ground that there was no probable cause to issue the warrant; (2) denied his motion for a hearing pursuant to Franks v. Delaware, supra, 438 U.S. at 154, 98 S.Ct 2674, on the ground that material facts were omitted from the application for the search warrant for a sample of the defendant's blood; (3) denied the defendant's motion to suppress certain statements made by ...
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