People v. Sutton

Judgment, Supreme Court, Bronx County (Frank Diaz, J.), rendered February 14, 1990, convicting defendant, after jury trial, of manslaughter in the first degree, and sentencing him to a term of 8V3 to 25 years, unanimously affirmed.

Defendant raises numerous issues which were previously rejected by this Court in deciding the appeal of codefendant Robert Braithwaite ( 188 AD2d 388 ). In addition, defendant claims that the prosecutor’s summation comment regarding the failure of a People’s witness to make an in-court identification of him improperly bolstered that witness’s testimony. The trial court properly exercised its discretion in denying defendant’s application for a mistrial based, inter alia, on this comment (People v Ortiz, 54 NY2d 288 ). Thereafter, the trial court sustained the objection and gave a detailed curative instruction to the jury. As defendant requested no further curative action, he has waived appellate review of his claim of error as a matter of law (People v Santiago, 52 NY2d 865 , 866). In any event, it is presumed that the jury understood and followed the court’s proper curative instruction (People v Davis, 58 NY2d 1102 ), and considering that defense counsel made reference to the issue in his summation, and there was

Despite a possible single misstatement by the trial court in its jury charge on reasonable doubt, we perceive no reversible error, as the charge as a whole conveyed the appropriate legal principle (People v Coleman, 70 NY2d 817 ). Concur—Wallach, J. P., Kupferman, Ross and Kassal, JJ.