State v. Orlando

• Court: Connecticut Court of Appeals
• Writing for the Court: SEELEY. J.
• Citation: State v. Orlando, 338 A.3d 379, 233 Conn.App. 1 (Conn. App. 2025)
• Docket Number: AC 46830
• Decision Date: 03 June 2025
• Parties: STATE of Connecticut v. ORLANDO F.

338 A.3d 379

233 Conn.App. 1

STATE of Connecticut

v.ORLANDO F.^*

(AC 46830)

Appellate Court of Connecticut.

Argued February 4, 2025

Officially Released June 3, 2025

Lisa J. Steele, assigned counsel, for the appellant (defendant).

Alexander A. Kambanis, deputy assistant state’s attorney, with whom, on the brief, were Michael A. Gailor, state’s attorney, and Steven M. Lesko, assistant state’s attorney, for the appellee (state).

Moll, Seeley and Prescott, Js.

SEELEY. J.

₃The defendant, Orlando F., appeals from the judgment of conviction, rendered after a jury trial, of attempt to commit robbery in the first degree in violation of General Statutes §§ 53a-49 (a) (2) and 53a-134 (a) (3), robbery in the first degree in violation of § 53a-134 (a) (3) and reckless endangerment in the first degree in violation of General Statutes § 53a-63. On appeal, the defendant claims that the trial court improperly (1) admitted into evidence testimony by a lay witness who identified him from a surveillance video recording during trial and (2) committed plain error by improperly instructing the jury about that witness’ identification. We disagree and, accordingly, affirm the judgment of the court.

On the basis of the evidence presented at trial, the jury reasonably could have found the following facts. On the evening of July 25, 2020, the victim and the defendant used a dating application called Grindr¹ to plan to meet for a sexual encounter. The two men had not interacted previously through the dating application, and the defendant used the false name of “John” while interacting with the victim. They initially agreed that the victim would use his car to pick up the defendant on Main Street in Cromwell; however, the defendant sent the victim a text message while he was on the way, asking, instead, to be picked up on New Lane ₄Street in Cromwell.² When the victim arrived at New Lane Street in the early morning of July 26, 2020, the defendant approached the victim’s vehicle, entered it, and sat in the passenger seat.³

The victim and the defendant engaged in “normal conversation” for about twenty to thirty seconds as the victim drove toward an intersection. When the victim turned right at the intersection, the defendant held a kitchen knife to the victim’s face and instructed him to drive to a bank. The victim, worried because he did not have money in the bank, told the defendant that he was between jobs, after which the defendant instructed him to drive to the highway. The victim continued driving and offered the defendant his cell phone. When he handed his cell phone to the defendant, the victim tried to disarm the defendant by grabbing the blade of the knife, at which point he dropped his phone. Thereafter, the victim stopped the car, opened the driver’s side door, and fled, screaming for help. When he turned around to see if the defendant was chasing him, he saw that the defendant had gotten into the driver’s seat of the car. The victim, who did not want the defendant to steal his car, went back toward the car and tried to open the rear driver’s side door, which was locked. He then opened the driver’s side door and attempted to pull the defendant out of the vehicle, but the defendant proceeded to drive away while the victim was holding onto the car.⁴ The victim continued trying to pull the ₅defendant out of the car; however, the defendant subsequently bit the victim’s right forearm and accelerated the vehicle, which caused the victim to let go of the car and fall into the street, landing on the road.

The victim thereafter stood up, noticed that he was covered in blood and missing a shoe, and saw the defendant drive away in his vehicle. While yelling for help, the victim ran down the street to a gas station and asked the clerk to call the police. When officers from the Cromwell Police Department arrived at the gas station, they observed the victim as being upset and having ripped clothing, one shoe, a lacerated right hand, and multiple scrapes. The victim told the officers that his car had been stolen by a person who tried to stab him and that he had been thrown out of the moving vehicle. He also provided them with a description of the perpetrator.

Paramedics arrived and treated the victim at the scene before transporting him by ambulance to a hospital.⁵

Shortly afterward, the detective assigned to the case, Elizabeth Jones, interviewed the victim at the hospital. While there, she swabbed the bite wound on the victim’s forearm for DNA and took a buccal swab from the interior of the victim’s mouth. The swabs were sent for DNA testing at the state forensic laboratory. Subsequently, Jones obtained surveillance video footage from a residential security camera on New Lane Street (New Lane Street video footage) that showed the victim picking up a bald man wearing a tank top and shorts on July 26, 2020.⁶ After the victim’s stolen vehicle was ₆found on Camp field Avenue in Hartford on July 27, 2020, Jones swabbed the interior of the vehicle for DNA evidence. During her investigation, Jones viewed surveillance video footage from a residential security camera near where the victim’s vehicle was found, which showed the vehicle being left at that location on July 26, 2020, by a bald man with a clearly visible chest tattoo who was wearing a tank top and shorts (Camp field Avenue video footage).⁷ Upon being shown the video footage, Jones recorded it on her police department issued cell phone. After the police identified the defendant as a suspect, they obtained and executed a search warrant for the defendant’s “saliva secretions and buccal cell samples … for the purpose of DNA identification and comparison ….” The police also obtained a search warrant for the contents of the defendant’s cell phone, which they had seized when executing the warrant to obtain the DNA samples.

At the state forensic laboratory, the sample taken from the victim’s bite wound tested positive for amylase, a component of saliva. An extraction from the sample collected from the victim’s bite wound yielded a DNA profile that contained a mixture from two males and included the defendant’s DNA profile. A forensic examiner concluded from the DNA analysis, after ₇assuming that the victim was one of the two contributors, that the DNA profile was at least 100 billion times more likely to occur if it came from the defendant and the victim, rather than from the victim and another unknown individual, and that the mixture contained more of the defendant’s DNA profile than it did the victim’s.⁸ Moreover, an analysis of the contents of the defendant’s cell phone revealed that he had not made or received any phone calls between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m. on July 26, 2020, during which time the victim was attacked and his car was stolen, although an “excess” of calls had been made from or received by the defendant’s cell phone before and after that time frame.

The defendant was arrested and subsequently charged in an amended long form information with attempt to commit robbery in the first degree in violation of §§ 53a-49 (a) (2) and 53a-134 (a) (3), larceny in the third degree in violation of General Statutes § 53a-124 (a) (1), robbery in the first degree in violation of § 53a-134 (a) (3), assault in the second degree in violation of General Statutes § 53a-60 (a) (2) and reckless endangerment in the first degree in violation of § 53a-63.

Prior to the commencement of a jury trial in this case, the state disclosed its intention to call as a witness ₈B, a former romantic partner of the defendant and the mother of two of his children.⁹ On January 17, 2023, the defendant filed a motion in limine in which he sought to preclude B from identifying him as the person in the Campfield Avenue video footage, arguing that, under the totality of the circumstances test set forth in State v. Gore, 342 Conn. 129, 150-51, 269 A.3d 1 (2022), any such testimony should be excluded as a result of her “undeniable bias toward the defendant ….” On January 24, 2023, the second day of trial, the court held a hearing on the defendant’s motion in limine outside the presence of the jury. At the hearing, the prosecutor called B as a witness and showed her the Campfield Avenue video footage. After she viewed the footage, B testified, inter alia, that she was “1025 percent … sure” that the defendant is the person in the footage. Following cross-examination of B and arguments of counsel, the court denied the defendant’s motion in limine. Thereafter, the jury was brought back into the courtroom, and B identified the defendant as the person in the Campfield Avenue video footage.

At trial, the state also presented testimony from, inter alia, Jones; the victim; John Dibiase, the Cromwell resident who provided the police with the New Lane Street video footage, which was admitted into evidence; Javier Ortiz, the Hartford resident who allowed the police to record the Campfield Avenue video footage, which was admitted into evidence; Jennifer Green, the state forensic examiner who tested the samples taken from the victim’s bite wound and vehicle; and Frances Rue, the state forensic examiner who conducted the DNA analyses of the samples. At the conclusion of trial, the jury found the defendant not guilty of the larceny and assault charges, and guilty of the remaining three charges. On ₉April 18, 2023, the court, Oliver, J,, sentenced the defendant to a total effective term of nineteen years of incarceration, followed by four years of special parole with recommended special conditions.¹⁰ This appeal followed. Additional facts and procedural history will be set forth as necessary.

I

The defendant first claims that the trial court abused its discretion by permitting B to identify him in court as the person in the Campfield Avenue video footage. We are not persuaded.

[1] We first set forth our standard of review and legal principles that govern our resolution of this claim. “Whether to admit opinion testimony identifying an individual in a...