What's your opinion regarding evidence destruction? Voice it in the poll below:

 

The True Story of
Larry Youngblood and David

It was a black man, David said, who abducted him from a church carnival and tormented him for an hour and half before returning him to the carnival. His abductor told David he’d kill him if he told anyone. But ten-year-old David told his mom anyway, and she rushed him to the hospital, where a rape examination confirmed her worst fears. Although David hadn’t worn his glasses that night, he remembered that the man was black. “Gray hair, greasy,” he said. “Middle-age. He had hair on his face. I didn’t see any scars, but he had an eye that was white, almost all white.”

A week and half later, the police talked to David again. “Look at these pictures,” they said. “Do you recognize anyone?” David had left his glasses behind, but he pointed to an image, “That one.” Youngblood had a bad left eye. Youngblood’s hair was black and dry, but the police knew that hair color and greasiness could be transitory. And there were some differences between Youngblood’s car the car driven by David’s attacker, but who can expect a ten-year-old to get all the details right? Both cars were white.Youngblood’s alibi was shaky. His girlfriend had been away visiting her mother at the time of the abduction, when Youngblood claimed to home alone. Youngblood was arrested, charged, and tried for sexual assault, child molestation, and kidnapping. David’s eyewitness testimony was central to the prosecution’s winning case. Youngblood appealed his conviction. His attorneys believed that DNA analysis of David’s clothing and the swabs taken during David’s medical examination would exonerate their client. Unfortunately, the State of Arizona had failed to refrigerate the material, and it had degraded to the point that it could no longer be reliably tested. That failure to preserve vital evidence was enough for the Arizona Court of Appeals to overturn the conviction. Youngblood was released from prison, but his case was not yet concluded. The State appealed the reversal, and in 1988 the Supreme Court of the United States announced their decision: The Court of Appeals had been wrong!

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist asserted that the State cannot be held responsible for preserving evidence that could only potentially prove the defendant’s innocence.

After Rehnquist’s opinion, Larry Youngblood went back to prison to serve his sentence. In evidence rooms around the nation potentially exculpatory material could now disappear without consequence.

The year 2000 came and instead of bringing the technological collapse so many Y2K fear-mongers had predicted, it brought better DNA tests that teased the secret from the stains on David’s clothing. The DNA belonged not to Larry Youngblood, but to Walter Cruise, a gray-haired black man who was blind in one eye and already serving time for another crime. Larry was released from prison. Cruise eventually pled guilty to assaulting David.

After learning that DNA evidence exonerated Larry Youngblood and implicated someone else, David, now in his late twenties, stepped in front of a freight train.