Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 123 > Issue 1 (2024)
Abstract
Criminal defendants face an uphill battle when attempting to prove that the government’s loss or destruction of evidence that could have played a significant role in their defense deprived them of their constitutional due process rights. To make this showing, the defendant must prove that the government lost or destroyed the evidence in bad faith. This requirement is problematic because direct evidence illustrating the subjective intent of the government officials who lost or destroyed the evidence is unlikely to exist, and in the off chance it does, the prosecution is unlikely to freely hand it over to the defendant. Thus, short of an admission from the government that it lost or destroyed the evidence in bad faith—which is also unlikely to happen—criminal defendants face an evidentiary void that makes it extremely difficult for them to satisfy the bad faith requirement, thereby limiting their ability to obtain constitutional recourse.
This Note proposes a burden-shifting framework that seeks to mitigate this problem. This framework effectively shifts the burden of producing evidence demonstrating the prosecution’s good or bad faith to the prosecution itself—the party best situated to make this showing. In so doing, it preserves the essence of the bad faith requirement—thereby increasing the Supreme Court’s receptiveness to adopting this change—while also rectifying the evidentiary imbalance between the prosecution and the defendant, making it easier for criminal defendants to satisfy the bad faith requirement and, consequently, vindicate their due process rights.
Recommended Citation
Rita Elfarissi,
Reimagining Youngblood's Bad Faith Requirement: Safeguarding Criminal Defendants' Due Process Rights Through a Burden-Shifting Framework,
123
Mich. L. Rev.
51
(2024).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol123/iss1/3
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