Background
Ohio police attempted to stop Kim Lynn Fitch, Jr. on January 6, 2023, and learned that he had outstanding felony warrants. Fitch initially stopped but then fled, prompting a 53-minute pursuit through northern Ohio and southeastern Michigan. Although officers deployed stop sticks three times and Fitch lost two tires, he continued driving at high speeds, entered oncoming traffic, disregarded traffic controls, and forced other vehicles from the road.
Fitch ultimately lost control while negotiating a sharp turn at approximately 50 mph in a 30-mph zone and struck a lamppost. His passenger, Lesley Rosales, suffered fatal blunt-force injuries. A jury convicted Fitch of involuntary manslaughter as a lesser offense of second-degree murder, first-degree fleeing and eluding resulting in death, and reckless driving causing death. As a fourth-offense habitual offender, he received concurrent prison terms of 13 to 30 years for manslaughter and reckless driving and 17 to 30 years for fleeing and eluding.
Representing himself at trial, Fitch argued that the lead pursuing officer had caused the crash by performing a precision immobilization technique maneuver and that police had mishandled or destroyed evidence to conceal that fact. On appeal, he challenged the preservation of evidence, exclusion of data from his vehicle’s crash data recorder, the sufficiency of the causation evidence, and the scoring of several sentencing variables.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed. It held that Fitch failed to establish a due-process violation under the standards governing suppressed or unpreserved evidence. Some requested footage never existed, other recordings and photographs were lost through data corruption, and Fitch did not show that the missing material was exculpatory or favorable to him or that police or prosecutors acted in bad faith.
The court also upheld the exclusion of the crash-data-recorder report. The report contained unexplained raw data, and Fitch offered it through an officer trained to retrieve—but not analyze—the data. Because Fitch did not establish the data’s reliability through a qualified expert, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by excluding it or by declining to conduct a pretrial reliability hearing when neither party had identified an expert who would interpret it.
The evidence was sufficient for a rational jury to find that Fitch factually and proximately caused Rosales’s death. Eyewitness testimony and crash-scene and medical evidence supported the finding that Fitch lost control after continuing the high-speed flight on damaged tires. The court also upheld the challenged sentencing range: it found no error in the scores for offense variables 3 and 17, and although the parties agreed that offense variable 12 was scored incorrectly, removing that score—even together with the challenged offense-variable-5 score—would not change the applicable guidelines range or require resentencing.
Key Takeaways
- A claim involving missing evidence requires more than speculation: the defendant must establish that the evidence was favorable or exculpatory or, for merely potentially useful evidence, that law enforcement acted in bad faith.
- Raw vehicle crash data may be excluded when its proponent does not establish reliability or provide a qualified expert capable of interpreting or validating it.
- Testimony describing Fitch’s prolonged, high-speed flight on damaged tires, together with crash-scene and medical evidence, was sufficient to establish causation.
- A guidelines-scoring error does not require resentencing when correcting it would leave the applicable sentencing range unchanged.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates the evidentiary foundation required to use crash-data-recorder information in a criminal trial. Training sufficient to retrieve electronic vehicle data does not necessarily qualify a witness to interpret it, and unexplained raw data may not satisfy Michigan’s reliability requirements for expert evidence.
It also underscores the distinct showings required for claims involving evidence that was allegedly suppressed, never created, or lost after collection. Without proof of favorable content or bad-faith destruction, gaps in police recordings or photographs will not by themselves establish a due-process violation.