The Superior Court held that multiple observations supplied reasonable suspicion to extend a traffic stop for a dog sniff and that the driver voluntarily consented to an interior search.
The Massachusetts SJC affirmed a new trial where witness records, third-party-culprit evidence, and modern DNA results collectively cast real doubt on a murder conviction.
On remand, the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld exclusion of inflammatory impeachment and prior-act evidence and reinstated the jury’s defense verdict.
The Supreme Court of Guam overruled its prior decision, holding that discovery did not satisfy GRE 404(b) notice, and reversed Philips James Sablan’s conviction.
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.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed a bench-trial judgment for Katya Hutton against the Estate of Robert P. Dykes, holding the district court did not abuse its discretion in implicitly denying Rule 37 sanctions—no prior order-to-show-cause hearing had been sought, the Estate declined an offered continuance, and trial testimony confirmed Hutton had produced everything in her possession—and that the court did not clearly err in finding the Estate failed to prove Hutton misappropriated condo rental income where the Marriott records it relied on were demonstrably unreliable.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed a conviction for aggravated sexual abuse of a child, holding that Utah Rule of Evidence 404(c) requires no similarity between prior child molestation acts and the charged offense for propensity evidence to be admissible, and that trial counsel was not ineffective for retaining a juror whose troubling statements during voir dire were followed by an audible chuckle and an express affirmation of the presumption of innocence.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated all judgments and set aside all verdicts in a child sexual abuse prosecution, holding that the trial judge abused her discretion by allowing prior bad act testimony covering forty-two transcript pages to overwhelm the twenty-six pages of testimony on the charged conduct. The court stressed that trial judges have an independent duty to control the volume of prior bad act evidence and that limiting instructions cannot cure the prejudice when such evidence is so voluminous as to invite a propensity inference in a credibility-dependent case.
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 Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated a sexually dangerous person (SDP) civil commitment after finding that all three Commonwealth experts had based their sexual sadism disorder diagnoses almost entirely on facts from police reports for charges dismissed in 2002 and 2003. Because the petitioner requested a voir dire on independent admissibility and the Commonwealth never showed the complainants could or would testify, allowing the experts to rely on those allegations without an admissibility hearing was reversible error under Markvart and Department of Youth Servs. v. A Juvenile.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s refusal to instruct the jury under Model Utah Jury Instruction CV212 on “violation of a safety law,” holding that voluntary consensus standards from ANSI, ASTM, and the non-adopted portions of the International Building Code are not “safety laws” within the instruction’s meaning—which, under the noscitur a sociis canon and Restatement (Second) of Torts § 288B, is limited to formally codified statutes, ordinances, and administrative rules with the force of law.
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 found no plain error in a heroin trafficking trial, holding that the additional guilty-knowledge jury instruction is triggered only when the defendant affirmatively contends he did not know the substance’s identity, and that evidence showing no drug terminology appeared in intercepted communications does not constitute such a contention absent any indication the defendant believed the substance to be something other than heroin.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals vacated portions of an equitable distribution order, holding that a trial court is bound by the parties’ pretrial stipulation classifying the townhome as fully marital property and may not carve out a separate component, and that once the non-owning spouse shows marital-period gains in a premarital investment account (triggering a presumption of marital property), the burden shifts to the owning spouse to prove those gains were passive, not to the non-owner to prove they were active.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed a Rule 41(b) dismissal of a DSS abuse and neglect petition at the close of DSS’s evidence, holding that nearly 1,500 pages of medical records admitted as business records cannot establish non-accidental injury causation without expert medical testimony, and that parental explanations introduced through DSS’s own witnesses that were consistent with accidental injury could not be rebutted by business records alone.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals arrested judgment on an assault-inflicting-serious-bodily-injury conviction as merging with AWDWIKISI under the double jeopardy clause when no distinct interruption in the assault was established, while affirming that a prosecutor’s one-minute breath-holding demonstration during closing argument was not grossly improper and that a lesser-included offense instruction on assault inflicting serious injury was not required where the State’s evidence of deadly-weapon use was uncontradicted.
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 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 North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed a DWI/fleeing-to-elude conviction, holding that the trial court did not err under Rule 404(b) when it allowed the State to cross-examine the defendant about a prior urban police encounter that contradicted his trial testimony that he “would have pulled over” if approached in the city, and that the Rule 403 determination did not rise to an abuse of discretion despite the evidence’s limited probative value and high prejudice potential.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed convictions for secret peeping, second-degree sexual exploitation of a minor, and third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor arising from hidden charging-block cameras installed in bathrooms, holding that the 1978 “intent to invade privacy” gloss from In re Banks does not apply to the elements of the current N.C.G.S. § 14-202(f) felony secret-peeping statute.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed a juvenile court’s finding that Father neglected his two minor children, holding the court did not abuse its discretion in admitting hair follicle test results collected after the date of alleged neglect, because the tests covered the relevant period and any challenge to their probative force went to weight rather than admissibility.
The Seventh Court of Appeals affirmed a fifteen-year conviction for aggravated assault on a public servant, holding that threats relayed through crisis negotiators to officers on scene satisfy the statute, and that felony deadly conduct is not a lesser-included offense of aggravated assault by threat where the indictment charges only exhibiting — not discharging — a weapon. The court modified the judgment to delete an attorney’s fees provision entered without the required finding of financial resources.