Background
John Mallozzi, then chairman of the Stamford Democratic City Committee, was convicted after a bench trial of fourteen counts of false statement in absentee balloting and fourteen counts of forgery in the second degree arising from fraudulent absentee ballot applications and ballots submitted to the Stamford town clerk during the 2015 municipal election cycle. The state’s case rested heavily on forensic handwriting analysis by Greg Kettering, a state forensic science examiner, who compared handwritten entries on the contested applications against exemplars provided by the defendant.
Kettering’s pre-trial written reports stated only that twenty-six applications showed “indications” of “common authorship” with the defendant’s exemplars — a conclusion he defined as “far short of an identification.” However, on direct examination at trial, Kettering testified to an additional conclusion he had not included in his case notes: based on the totality of 178 individual similarities across all fourteen charged applications, it was “virtually certain” and “highly probable” that the defendant was the common author. Defense counsel moved to strike that testimony and, on the fifth day of trial and during cross-examination of Kettering — the state’s final witness — requested a continuance to disclose and call his own handwriting expert to rebut it.
The trial court denied the request, reasoning that the state had disclosed Kettering as a witness years before trial and that allowing a new, unidentified expert at such a late stage would be impractical and unfair. The Appellate Court affirmed, and the Connecticut Supreme Court granted certification on the single question of whether the trial court abused its discretion in denying the request.
The Court’s Holding
The Connecticut Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, holding that the trial court did not abuse its broad discretion under Practice Book § 40-13(c) in denying defense counsel’s request to present a previously undisclosed expert witness. Although § 40-13(c) embraces a presumption against preclusion as a sanction for late disclosure, it is incumbent on the moving party to make a showing of good cause. The court found that the defense had failed to do so on three independent grounds.
First, the request constituted a substantial — not merely technical — departure from the defense’s disclosure obligations, arriving on the fifth day of trial during cross-examination of the prosecution’s final witness, long after the state had complied with its own expert disclosure duties. Second, the defense could not demonstrate genuine surprise: the January 2019 arrest warrant affidavit — part of the public court file for more than three years before trial — expressly quoted Kettering’s conclusion that “the totality of the case points strongly toward [the defendant]” as the author, making any discrepancy between that conclusion and his written reports apparent to the defense well before trial. Third, defense counsel never identified the proposed expert by name, title, or field, and offered only a vague suggestion that the witness might testify for approximately one hour, depriving the court of any meaningful basis to assess prejudice or the desirability of a continuance.
The court declined to reach whether the state’s pre-trial disclosure of Kettering’s oral “totality” opinion satisfied the discovery rules under Practice Book § 40-11(a)(3), noting the parties had not briefed the applicability of the recently decided State v. Dabate, 351 Conn. 428 (2025), and that the defendant had expressly disclaimed any prosecutorial-impropriety claim. The court did, however, urge the Rules Committee of the Superior Court to consider revisions to Connecticut’s criminal expert-disclosure rules — which have not materially changed in over thirty years — to require more robust disclosure akin to federal Rule 16 and existing civil practice.
Key Takeaways
- A party seeking mid-trial permission to call a previously undisclosed expert must demonstrate good cause for the late disclosure; the presumption under Practice Book § 40-13(c) runs against preclusion but does not excuse the moving party’s burden to justify the delay.
- Where the expert’s core conclusion appeared in a publicly filed arrest warrant affidavit available to the defense for more than three years, the defense cannot credibly claim unfair surprise at trial when that conclusion is repeated from the witness stand.
- A vague, unidentified proffer — no expert name, no title, no substantive summary of expected testimony — is legally insufficient to permit meaningful appellate review of prejudice or the desirability of a continuance, and will ordinarily doom the request.
- The court signaled that Connecticut’s criminal expert-disclosure framework is overdue for reform and explicitly invited the Rules Committee to bring criminal practice closer to the more demanding standards already in place in civil cases and under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16.
Why It Matters
The decision is a practical reminder for Connecticut criminal defense practitioners that the right to rebut an adverse expert is not self-executing. Counsel must independently investigate expert witnesses disclosed by the state — including reviewing arrest warrant affidavits and other court filings, not just the written reports formally produced in discovery — and retain potential rebuttal experts in advance of trial. Waiting until cross-examination of the state’s final witness to identify the need for an expert will almost certainly be deemed untimely, regardless of any alleged surprise in the expert’s trial testimony.
Beyond the immediate outcome, the court’s extended call for criminal discovery reform has broader significance. By noting the “tension” between Dabate (condemning the failure to disclose a material oral expert opinion) and Genotti (limiting disclosure obligations to written materials), and by surveying robust expert-disclosure rules in over a dozen other jurisdictions, the Connecticut Supreme Court has laid groundwork for a potential overhaul of Practice Book expert-disclosure requirements in criminal cases — a development that would affect prosecution and defense practice across the state.