The Utah Court of Appeals held that negligent charging delay did not violate the Sixth Amendment where claimed parole and plea consequences were speculative.
The Utah Supreme Court held that violating the rule governing nighttime warrant service does not itself require suppression without a constitutional violation, bad faith, or prejudice.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed Steven Randall Marler’s convictions on eight counts of sexual abuse and six counts of battery against children in his care, holding that the district court properly admitted broad Rule 404(b) “other acts” evidence of grooming rituals and a fear-based disciplinary regimen, that a victim’s collateral lie to a jail guard was excludable without violating the Confrontation Clause, that a rule-of-completeness claim was waived by failure to make an offer of proof, and that brief prosecutorial questioning about a victim’s father’s suicide did not constitute plain-error misconduct.
Conviction reversed and new trial ordered: trial court required the People to give race-neutral reasons for peremptory challenges — implicitly finding a prima facie Batson case — then erroneously denied the challenge at step 1 without proceeding to pretext analysis at step 3.
Appellate Division affirms dismissal of weapons indictment after finding the DA’s Certificate of Compliance was invalid — failure to disclose police memo books and property vouchers constituted a lack of due diligence under CPL 245, triggering a speedy-trial violation under CPL 30.30.
The Appellate Division, Second Department sustained a habeas writ for a defendant held more than 90 days without a valid certificate of compliance, finding the People’s supplemental CoC deficient because 60-plus automatic discovery items—including mandatory impeachment materials—remained outstanding at the time of filing.
The Alaska Court of Appeals vacated Nick Frankson’s sentence because the State undermined its plea agreement and the trial judge failed to obtain Frankson’s personal decision to maintain his pleas.
The Nevada Supreme Court reversed Allen’s convictions for sexual assault on a minor, holding en banc that a district court abused its discretion in finding A.S.’s juvenile records of a nearly identical prior sexual offense irrelevant to Allen’s alternative-suspect defense. The court found the error was not harmless where it foreclosed pretrial investigation, terminated the admissibility inquiry, the jury independently indicated interest in the alternative suspect, and the State exploited the exclusion to elicit misleading testimony.
The Alaska Court of Appeals affirmed Lane’s DUI conviction under AS 28.35.030(a)(2), holding that the post-driving-drinking defense under AS 28.35.030(s) requires “some evidence” of actual post-driving consumption before a trial court must instruct the jury; an eight-minute gap between watercraft operation and a traffic stop, standing alone, did not meet that threshold. The court also called on the Criminal Pattern Jury Instructions Committee to revise the blood-alcohol-level DUI instruction to address its tension with the post-driving-drinking defense statute.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed Aaron Verive’s four class B misdemeanor convictions for unlawful detention and domestic violence in the presence of a child, holding that momentarily blocking a preferred exit—whether a doorway or a vehicle—satisfies the unlawful detention statute regardless of duration or alternative routes, and that events immediately following the charged acts were intrinsic evidence outside Rule 404(b)’s other-acts exclusion.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated Robert Albert’s rape-of-a-child convictions and remanded for a new trial, holding that his daughter’s private diary entry — written the day after the last alleged assault but never shared with anyone — could not qualify as “first complaint evidence” under Commonwealth v. King because the first complaint doctrine requires a communication to another person; the entry was more detailed than the actual oral disclosure, deprived the defendant of a witness to cross-examine, and was accompanied by a limiting instruction that misdescribed the diary as a “telling” of the assault.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals held that a defendant who clearly invokes the right to self-representation but then refuses to answer any of the trial court’s N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1242 questions cannot establish a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of counsel, and the trial court therefore did not err in denying the request to proceed pro se.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals reversed and remanded Kendrick Lee’s ABHAN conviction and life-without-parole sentence, holding that the trial court erred by excusing the only Black prospective juror based on a hearing impairment without first conducting an individualized inquiry into whether reasonable accommodations could have enabled that juror to render efficient service, as required by the ADA and S.C. Code Ann. § 14-7-1020.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals reversed Brian Redding’s murder conviction, holding the circuit court erred in denying his directed verdict motion because the State’s wholly circumstantial case—comprising a difficult relationship, theoretical access to the murder weapon, a clothing change, and trace gunshot-residue on shorts—raised only a suspicion of guilt rather than substantial circumstantial evidence, particularly in light of Redding’s corroborated alibi and innocent explanations for each item of State’s evidence.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals held that a criminal defendant wearing a private bond company’s GPS ankle monitor retains a reasonable expectation of privacy in that location data under the Fourth Amendment and Article I, Section 10 of the South Carolina Constitution, requiring a warrant; though the trial court erred in admitting the warrantlessly obtained GPS data, the error was harmless given the victim’s in-court identification, the stolen moped evidence, and the victim’s debit card found on the defendant at arrest.
The Appellate Division, First Department reversed a dismissal and reinstated a class action challenging the NYPD’s practice of routinely handcuffing all arrestees during arraignment without judicial approval, finding the policy states a viable due process claim under the New York State Constitution.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed six sexual-abuse convictions, holding that uncharged grooming conduct is admissible as intrinsic evidence outside Rule 404(b), that a charging variance between the information and the acts proven at trial raises sufficiency and notice issues—not jurisdictional ones—and that failure to seek a trial continuance upon discovering the variance waives procedural-due-process claims.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed a child enticement conviction, holding that the sufficiency-of-evidence inquiry is subjective—asking whether this defendant believed the persona was a minor—and that entrapment as a matter of law requires more than a realistic undercover persona; here, the defendant’s own texts and statements showed actual knowledge of the victim’s age and independent criminal initiative.
The Appellate Division, Second Department reverses a weapon possession conviction after finding that officers lacked reasonable suspicion to pursue a man who walked between two residential driveways, rendering the subsequent discovery of a discarded firearm the product of an unlawful seizure.
The Appellate Division, Second Department holds that CPLR Article 78 prohibition does not lie to challenge a criminal court’s evidence preclusion order under CPL 245.80(1)(a), even when the order would effectively prevent the prosecution from presenting its case.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals dismissed a pretrial detainee’s appeal of a circuit court order releasing his jail telephone calls to the media, holding the order was non-appealable as interlocutory, and reaffirming that South Carolina requires evidence of actual juror bias rather than presumed prejudice from pretrial publicity.
The Indiana Supreme Court held that when the State proves the constitutionality of a search or seizure at a pretrial suppression hearing, it is not required to re-establish constitutional compliance at trial; courts assessing the stop’s validity may consider evidence from both the suppression hearing and the trial, and the exclusionary rule’s aims are fully served by requiring proof once.
The First Department modified a probation sentence, striking four conditions as not reasonably necessary under Penal Law § 65.10(1): a financial surcharge on an indigent defendant relying on public assistance, a dependent-support condition where the defendant had no dependents, an order-of-protection compliance condition with no supporting history, and a gang-paraphernalia ban with no evidence of any gang connection.
The Wyoming Supreme Court unanimously affirmed consecutive sentences for a former Casper police officer who pleaded guilty to five counts of aggravated assault and battery following a prolonged armed standoff, holding that a plea agreement capping the State’s “sentencing argument” was a non-binding recommendation under W.R.Cr.P. 11(e)(1)(B)—not a stipulated sentence under 11(e)(1)(C)—and that Wyoming district courts need not make specific findings when deviating from a sentencing recommendation.