STATE OF CONNECTICUT v. JAHMARI COOPER, SC 20865

Judicial District of Bridgeport

Criminal; Prosecutorial Impropriety; Whether Juvenile Defendant Knowingly and Voluntarily Waived Miranda Rights under Federal and State Constitutions; Whether Prosecutor's Comments during Closing Argument Deprived Defendant of Fair Trial. In 2017, eighteen-year-old Jeri Kollock (victim) was killed in a housing complex in Bridgeport. When police arrived on the scene, the victim was lying naked outside near the basement door of one of the buildings in the complex, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators recovered .45 caliber Tulammo-brand shell casings, blood, and the victim's clothes in an interior stairwell in the building. The trajectory of the bullets indicated they had been fired from above, and a trail of blood suggested that the victim had dragged himself down the stairwell to the basement after being shot. An acquaintance of the defendant identified him as a suspect through surveillance footage, which depicted the defendant leading the victim into the building through the basement door. Within minutes, the defendant was captured on camera leaving the building through the front entrance, whereupon he donned a Halloween mask and sprinted away. Police subsequently executed a search warrant at the defendant's residence, where he lived with his grandmother, who was his legal guardian. A .45 caliber firearm and Tulammo ammunition were found in the defendant's bedroom. While still at the residence, detectives interrogated the defendant in his grandmother's presence. After indicating that he understood his Miranda rights and agreeing to waive them, the defendant admitted to approaching the victim at school, patting him down for weapons, and then leading him to the housing complex, but he denied involvement in the shooting. Nineteen minutes into the interview, the defendant invoked his Miranda rights, but police continued the interview for another half hour. Shortly thereafter, the defendant fled the state and was not arrested until a year later. After a pretrial suppression hearing, the trial court found that the defendant had knowingly waived his Miranda rights, but it suppressed the portion of the statement given after he had invoked his right to remain silent. The court also ruled pretrial that the state's firearms expert would be permitted to testify regarding his analysis of the defendant's gun and the recovered bullet casings but was barred from stating with 100 percent certainty that the casings had been shot from the gun. The jury ultimately convicted the defendant of murder. Following sentencing, he appealed directly to the Supreme Court pursuant to General Statutes § 51-199 (b) (3). First, the defendant claims that the trial court erred in ruling that he had knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily waived his Miranda rights, given his age and intelligence, the circumstances of the interrogation, and the detectives' purportedly coercive conduct. Alternatively, he claims that the Supreme Court should adopt a "bright-line rule" requiring suppression of a juvenile's police statement when the juvenile was not given a meaningful opportunity to consult with "an interested adult" before waiving any Miranda rights. He argues that the state constitution should be construed as affording juvenile defendants greater protections than the federal constitution, citing Connecticut's long history of providing enhanced procedural protections for such defendants, judicial recognition of the intellectual and emotional immaturity of juveniles, precedent from other states holding that juvenile offenders must be given an opportunity to consult with an "interested adult," and the contemporary understanding that juvenile suspects do not fully appreciate the importance of Miranda rights. The defendant also claims that the prosecutor committed numerous improprieties in her closing argument that so infected the trial with unfairness as to make the resulting conviction a denial of due process. First, he argues that the prosecutor's characterization of the firearm expert's testimony as establishing a link between the recovered casings and the defendant's gun "to a certain degree of scientific certainty" violated the trial court's pretrial order and improperly bolstered the expert's testimony. Next, he asserts that the prosecutor argued facts not in evidence by asserting that the defendant had entrapped the victim and suggesting that the victim, immediately prior to being shot, had been forced at gunpoint to strip and had been on the ground begging for his life. The defendant also argues that the prosecutor improperly appealed to the jurors' emotions by emphasizing graphic but irrelevant details about the circumstances surrounding the victim's killing, particularly the fact that he was found naked.