People v. Matthews

The defendant was tried upon a twelve count indictment. The charges in the indictment were based upon seven separate *26incidents, each involving a different complainant. The incidents were in some respects similar. The assailant accosted each of his victims in the elevator of a New York City Housing Authority apartment building. The attacks uniformly began as knifepoint robberies and, in several of the incidents, escalated into sexual assaults committed either in a stairwell or on a roof landing.

In her summation the prosecutrix, over objection, urged the jury to consider the entire body of…