State v. Ortiz
| Decision Date | 02 December 1975 |
| Citation | 363 A.2d 1091,169 Conn. 642 |
| Court | Connecticut Supreme Court |
| Parties | STATE of Connecticut v. Sam (Inocenzio) ORTIZ. |
Gary I. Cohen, Sp. Public Defender, for appellant (defendant).
Walter H. Scanlon, Asst. State's Atty., with whom, on the brief, was Francis M. McDonald, Jr., State's Atty., for appellee (state).
Before HOUSE, C.J., and LOISELLE, BOGDANSKI, LONGO and BARBER, JJ.
The defendant, Sam Ortiz, was charged with the crime of conspiring to sell heroin, in violation of § 53a-48 of the General Statutes; 1 and, in part two of the information, was charged with being a second offender. Part two was subsequently nolled. On a trial to the jury, the defendant was found guilty of conspiracy and was sentenced to a term of not less than five years nor more than ten years in the custody of the commissioner of corrections. The defendant appealed to this court, alleging that the trial court erred in denying his motion to set aside the verdict, which the defendant claims is not supported by the evidence and is contrary to law. Both the state and the defendant agree that the sole issue presented in this appeal is whether there was sufficient evidence from which the jury could find that the defendant had knowingly participated in an unlawful agreement to sell heroin.
Since the case was tried to the jury before the changes in the rules of appellate procedure which became effective October 1, 1974 (see Practice Book § 629 et seq.), the question whether the verdict is supported by the evidence is tested by the summary of evidence printed in the appendices to the briefs. State v. Coleman, 167 Conn. 260, 262, 355 A.2d 11; State v. Mayell, 163 Conn. 419, 421, 311 A.2d 60. The following facts appear in the appendices and are not disputed in any important aspects: On June 8, 1972, undercover narcotics agents John Ferro and Robert J. Fox, dressed in old clothes and wearing long hair and beards, drove to Phil's Restaurant on Willow Street in Waterbury. Thirty days prior to that date, Officer Fox had been in the restaurant, and he had received information that there was a possibility that some transactions involving narcotics had occurred there. Officer Ferro went into the restaurant and, in the course of a conversation with the defendant, the officer told Ortiz that he wanted to buy narcotics. The defendant said he could take the officer to someone who sold narcotics in the Waterbury area. The defendant joined the two officers in their car and, as Officer Fox drove, the defendant directed the agents to the corner of West Clay and South Main Streets in Waterbury. There the defendant left the car and disappeared from sight. He returned shortly, accompanied by one Santos Estrada, who stood outside the car talking with Officer Ferro through the open window, negotiating the terms of the sale of the narcotics. Estrada handed four aluminum packets to the officer, in exchange for fifty dollars. The defendant had been seated in the car, but did not take part in the negotiations and did not handle either the money or the envelope. After driving the defendant to another part of Waterbury and leaving him there, the officers field-tested the material in the four bags and found that it contained heroin.
The defendant claims that the evidence in this case does no more than establish that he knew someone who sold heroin. He relies on a recent decision in which an original conviction of conspiracy was reversed because it was not supported by sufficient evidence. Reed v. Virginia, 213 Va. 593, 194 S.E.2d 746. The facts of that case distinguish it from the one we consider here. In Reed, Oritz' counterpart, Roger Reed, merely agreed to locate a seller "if if could find the person he usually scored from." Reed v. Virginia, supra, 594, 194 S.E.2d 746. What followed was a general, random search through the area. Initially, no conversation took place between Reed and the seller; the seller, on his own initiative, followed Reed and an undercover...
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