Background
On the afternoon of July 6, 2020, Edwin Franqui (the defendant) and his younger brother drove through Hartford, Connecticut, pulling alongside the vehicle of Junny Lara-Velazquez — a man with whom they had altercated the prior evening. While his brother drove their tan Infiniti, the defendant fired multiple shots into the victim’s Honda Accord, wounding a passenger and killing the victim with a shot to the head. The victim’s girlfriend, Dayzani Ortiz — who was in the car and had been familiar with both Franqui brothers for several months — identified the defendant to the first responding officer and again at trial. The victim’s Honda crashed into a Subway restaurant after losing control.
The defendant was charged in Hartford Superior Court with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, first-degree assault with a firearm, and criminal possession of a firearm. He was tried jointly with his younger brother and convicted on all counts, receiving a total effective sentence of fifty years. This appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court is a companion to State v. Franqui, 354 Conn. 400 (2026), which resolved the younger brother’s separate appeal.
On appeal, the defendant raised three claims: (1) the trial court committed plain error by failing to give the jury an eyewitness identification instruction consistent with State v. Ledbetter, 275 Conn. 534 (2005); (2) the court should exercise its supervisory authority to mandate such an instruction whenever good-faith misidentification is at issue; and (3) the court should abrogate the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule.
The Court’s Holding
The Connecticut Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice McDonald, affirmed the conviction on all counts. On the plain error claim, the court held that no obvious and readily discernible error occurred because Ledbetter‘s instruction requirement is triggered only where a significant risk of misidentification exists — and no such risk was present here. Ortiz had known the defendant and his brother for months before the shooting, had reason to recognize their distinctive tan Infiniti (formerly the victim’s own car, sold to the brothers just the week before), and identified them immediately. Because the familiarity between the witness and the defendant is explicitly cited in Ledbetter as an example negating any significant misidentification risk, the court found the first prong of plain error review unsatisfied and did not reach the prejudice prong.
The court also declined to exercise its supervisory authority to mandate model instruction 2.6-4 in every case involving a contested identification. The defendant sought a rule requiring the instruction whenever good-faith misidentification is at issue, but the court found the defense theory here was witness fabrication or untruthfulness — not good-faith mistake. The court concluded that blanket mandatory instructions regardless of theory of defense could distract or confuse juries and would improperly remove the trial court’s discretion to tailor instructions to the issues actually litigated. Finally, the court declined to abrogate the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule, incorporating by reference its reasoning from the companion case involving the younger Franqui brother.
Key Takeaways
- Under Ledbetter, an eyewitness identification jury instruction is not required — and its omission is not plain error — when the identifying witness was already familiar with the defendant prior to the incident, because no significant risk of misidentification exists in that circumstance.
- The Connecticut Supreme Court reaffirmed trial court discretion in deciding whether to give eyewitness identification instructions, declining to adopt a blanket rule mandating instruction 2.6-4 whenever identification is contested, and distinguishing cases where the real issue is witness credibility rather than the reliability of a stranger identification.
- The excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule remains intact under Connecticut law; the court declined to exercise supervisory authority to abrogate it despite the defendant’s argument that it rests on scientifically unsound assumptions about the reliability of statements made under stress.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the boundaries of Ledbetter‘s eyewitness instruction requirement, making clear that the rule is calibrated to cases involving stranger identifications and formal police identification procedures — not to situations where a witness already knew the defendant. Defense counsel handling cases with familiar-witness identifications will face a high bar in arguing that the absence of a Ledbetter instruction is reversible error.
More broadly, the opinion signals the court’s continued reluctance to use its supervisory authority to impose categorical jury instruction requirements that would constrain trial court discretion. Advocates seeking mandatory eyewitness instructions in Connecticut courts will need to pursue that change through legislative or rule-making channels rather than through case law, as the court expressly declined invitations to follow the more prescriptive approaches adopted by Alaska, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.