STATE OF CONNECTICUT v. ORANE C., SC 20843

Judicial District of Bridgeport

Criminal; Aggravated Sexual Assault; General Statutes (Rev. to 2019) § 54-193; Whether Trial Court Improperly Denied Motion to Dismiss Because Substitute Information Substantially Broadened Charge in Prior Information.  Beginning in 2002, the defendant forced the victim, his stepdaughter, to have sexual intercourse with him through physical abuse and by threatening to kill her mother.  In June, 2017, when the victim was twenty years old, she disclosed the ongoing sexual abuse to her mother, who reported it to the police in July, 2017.  The defendant was arrested in February, 2018, pursuant to an arrest warrant application that detailed recurring instances of sexual abuse from when the victim was age six until twenty, specifically describing three incidents that occurred, approximately, in 2014, 2016, and 2017.  In March, 2018, the state filed a long form information charging the defendant with, inter alia, one count of aggravated sexual assault in the first degree for conduct alleged to have occurred on July 22, 2017.  On February 7, 2020, the state filed a substitute information charging the defendant with, inter alia, two counts of aggravated sexual assault in the first degree and one count of sexual assault in the first degree for conduct occurring on, among other dates, January 1, 2014.  Following the close of the state's evidence, the defendant moved to dismiss the count of the February, 2020 substitute information pertaining to conduct that occurred in 2014 on the ground that it was time barred by General Statutes (Rev. to 2019) § 54-193, which precludes the prosecution of certain offenses "except within five years" after the underlying conduct.  Although the statute of limitations is tolled by the signing of the arrest warrant application, the defendant argued that any tolling ended when the February, 2020 substitute information broadened the charges.  The trial court denied the motion to dismiss after rejecting that claim and determining that the record was "replete with notice" that the defendant would face charges pertaining to conduct that occurred in 2014 "from the very beginning when [the arrest] warrant was served."  The defendant was convicted and sentenced to sixty years of incarceration, execution suspended after thirty years, and he appealed to the Appellate Court (218 Conn. App. 683).  That court rejected the defendant's claim that the trial court improperly denied his motion to dismiss because the February 7, 2020 substitute information substantially broadened the charges.  In considering the factors set forth in State v. Golodner (305 Conn. 330), the Appellate Court found that the original and substitute informations both charged the defendant with the same crime, aggravated sexual assault, and both informations relied on the same evidence, namely, the "detailed allegations" in the arrest warrant application concerning the 2014 assault.  The Appellate Court, emphasizing that "notice is the touchstone of the analysis," affirmed the judgment of conviction, and the defendant filed this appeal after the Supreme Court granted his petition for certification, limited to whether the Appellate Court correctly concluded that the February, 2020 substitute information did not substantially broaden the charges in the March, 2018 information.