The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed convictions for aggravated burglary and related charges, holding that trial counsel was not ineffective in declining to challenge for cause three jurors who raised their hands to leading voir dire questions and then affirmed their ability to follow jury instructions in response to the prosecutor’s follow-up.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed a restitution order for an aggravated kidnapping victim’s mother, holding that a medical form attributing her PTSD to the crime, her own written statements, and a UOVC restitution specialist’s declaration—taken together—provided sufficient evidence of proximate causation for her lost wages.
The Utah Court of Appeals reversed a grant of post-conviction relief, holding that the post-conviction court improperly applied the Chadwick presumption of prejudice to an ineffective-assistance claim; under Strickland, Miranda failed to show a reasonable probability that a proper unanimity instruction would have changed the verdict.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed summary judgment for a law firm on all legal malpractice claims, holding that issue preclusion arising from prior Tenth Circuit litigation conclusively barred GMW’s lost-profits theories and that GMW’s lost business value theory failed for lack of nonspeculative causation evidence.
The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed denial of a motion to arrest judgment on protective-order-violation convictions — holding that the State sufficiently proved the permanent order’s terms through testimony and a docket entry — but reversed all three convictions on ineffective-assistance grounds because defense counsel failed to seek redaction of a domestic-violence finding in the temporary protective order admitted as a trial exhibit, a finding the court had already ruled irrelevant and whose admission undermined confidence in the verdict.
For the third time, the Utah Court of Appeals vacated an order terminating Father’s parental rights as to two young children, holding that all three of his trial attorneys — retained counsel and two appointed counsel — rendered ineffective assistance by failing to file pretrial disclosures and seek a continuance, depriving Father of the ability to call sibling witnesses whose testimony bore directly on the best-interest determination; the court also held that Utah’s IAC right extends to retained attorneys who never formally enter an appearance.
The Utah Court of Appeals reversed an automobile accident verdict and remanded for a new trial after the trial court misapplied the collateral source rule by excluding evidence of employer-provided workplace accommodations, admitted medical records without proper business-records foundation under Utah R. Evid. 803(6), and improperly excluded life care planner testimony on work-life expectancy based on inconsistencies that went to weight rather than admissibility.