Summary
holding that kidnapping does not merge into robbery when the robbery is not incidental to the abduction of the victim
Summary of this case from Cartagena v. CorcoranOpinion
September 29, 1994
Appeal from the Supreme Court, Bronx County (Ira Globerman, J.).
Judgment, same court and Justice, rendered November 25, 1992, convicting defendant Carswell, after a jury trial, of three counts of kidnapping in the second degree and three counts of robbery in the first degree, and sentencing him, as a second violent felony offender, to six concurrent terms of 12 1/2 to 25 years, unanimously affirmed.
Since, after the robbery was virtually completed, there was a significant, egregious, and nonincidental asportation of the victims, during which defendants plotted murder or other crimes, the kidnapping did not merge into the robbery (People v Gonzalez, 80 N.Y.2d 146, 151-153).
The challenged portions of the prosecutor's summation did not exceed the broad bounds of legitimate response to defense argument (People v. Galloway, 54 N.Y.2d 396, 399).
Defendant Carswell was not denied effective assistance of counsel by his attorney revealing to the jury that he had been suspected, but exonerated, of another robbery, it being a plausible strategy (People v. Baldi, 54 N.Y.2d 137, 146-147) to claim that defendant was "framed" by a detective who had engineered defendant's identification in this case by making the identifying complainant aware of defendant's other case.
Concur — Murphy, P.J., Rosenberger, Wallach, Ross and Rubin, JJ.