| Arizona v. Youngblood | ||||||
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Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued October 11, 1988 Decided November 29, 1988 |
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| Full case name | Arizona, Petitioner v. Larry Youngblood | |||||
| Citations | 488 U.S. 51 (more) 109 S. Ct. 333; 102 L. Ed. 2d 281; 1988 U.S. LEXIS 5404; 57 U.S.L.W. 4013 |
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| Prior history | Cert. to the Court of Appeals of Arizona | |||||
| Holding | ||||||
| Unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law. | ||||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Rehnquist, joined by White, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy | |||||
| Concurrence | Stevens | |||||
| Dissent | Blackmun, joined by Brennan, Marshall | |||||
Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51 (1988), was an important United States Supreme Court case about the limits of Constitutional due process under criminal law.
Contents |
A boy was molested and sodomized. The rape kit was preserved in a refrigerator, but the boys clothes (containing samples of the assailant's semen) were not preserved in a refrigeration unit. At a later date, criminologists were unable to do testing on the clothing because it had deteriorated as a result of not being refrigerated. The boy picked the defendant out of a photo lineup as his assailant.
Next, the case developed as follows:
At trial, expert witnesses testified that respondent might have been completely exonerated by timely performance of tests on properly preserved semen samples. Respondent was convicted of child molestation, sexual assault, and kidnaping in an Arizona state court. The Arizona Court of Appeals reversed the conviction on the ground that the State had breached a constitutional duty to preserve the semen samples from the victim's body and clothing.—Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 US 51, 51 (1988).
The defendant claimed that the state disposed of potentially exculpatory evidence by not properly preserving the evidence.
The Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional violation in this case. In the Court's holding, the Court stated: “[w]e therefore hold that unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law.”[1] The court relied on United States v. Marion, 404 U.S. 307 (1971), United States v. Lovasco, 431 U.S. 783/case.html 783 (1977), and other cases for its reasoning.
In 2000, on request from Youngblood's attorneys, the police department tested the degraded evidence using new, sophisticated DNA technology. Those results exonerated Youngblood, and he was released from prison in August 2000, and charges were dismissed.[2]