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People v. Eagen12/29/1994
establish and follow strict procedures to preserve the evidence for a defendant's use. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that the state has a constitutional duty to preserve only that evidence that "might be expected to play a significant role in the suspect's defense." California v. Trombetta, supra, 467 U.S. at 488, 104 S.Ct. 2528 at 2534, 81 L.Ed.2d 413 at 422 (emphasis added). To satisfy this standard, the evidence must: (1) possess an exculpatory value that was apparent before the evidence was destroyed; and (2) be of such a nature that the defendant would be unable to obtain comparable evidence by other reasonably available means.
In People v. Sheppard, supra, decided immediately after Trombetta, our supreme court focused on the quality of the evidence destroyed, and not on the degree of prosecutorial impropriety, in determining whether a constitutional violation occurred. The Sheppard court continued to follow the "not merely incidental" test of Gallagher, supra, in determining whether the evidence was such that its destruction resulted in a violation of the defendant's due process rights. The court declined to apply the Trombetta standard because it concluded that the result would be the same under either test.
Two years later, our supreme court expressly adopted the Trombetta standard in place of the Gallagher "not merely incidental" test because it concluded that the Trombetta standard properly focused on the state's knowledge of the usefulness of the evidence to the defendant prior to its destruction. People v. Greathouse, 742 P.2d 334 (Colo. 1987). The holding of Greathouse limited the situations in which an accused could successfully demonstrate a due process violation premised on the state's failure to preserve evidence.
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the state's duty to preserve evidence when the exculpatory value of the evidence does not satisfy the Trombetta standard. Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51, 109 S.Ct. 333, 102 L.Ed.2d 281 (1988). The court characterized evidence of this nature as that which might have been "of conceivable evidentiary significance" in a prosecution, and "of which no more can be said than that it could have been subjected to tests, the results of which might have exonerated the defendant." Youngblood, supra, 488 U.S. at 57-58, 109 S.Ct. 333 at 337, 102 L.Ed.2d 281 at 289 (emphasis added). The court concluded that when this is all that can be said about the exculpatory value of the evidence that was destroyed, a defendant may still successfully claim that his due process rights were violated, but only if he can demonstrate that the prosecution acted in bad faith.
Colorado expressly adopted the holding of Youngblood in People v. Wyman, 788 P.2d 1278 (Colo. 1990).
II.
In the case at bar, the trial court applied People v. Sheppard to reach its Conclusion that defendant's due process rights were violated. This requires a remand because the Sheppard test was clearly rejected in People v. Greathouse, supra. There, the court stated that:
The Trombetta standard for determining the exculpatory value of evidence provides a more realistic way to evaluate a due process claim predicated on the state's duty to preserve evidence during the investigatory stage of a case than does the unduly expansive 'not merely incidental' test adopted in our prior cases [such as People v. Sheppard]. People v. Greathouse, supra, 742 P.2d at 338.
Furthermore, defendant's reliance on Sheppard merely because it is a vehicle case is misplaced. The facts of Sheppard are markedly different from those at issue here. In Sheppard, one
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