Opinion ID: 1960214
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Evidence Regarding the Receipt Bearing the Victim's Signature

Text: Defendant contends that the police planted the receipt signed by the victim on defendant at his arrest. At trial, the prosecutor methodically established that no officer could have planted this key piece of evidence, which was mixed in with the paper currency seized from defendant at the arrest scene, because no officer had yet been to the murder scene where the incriminating evidence could have been retrieved. Defendant seeks support in Kyles dicta: [w]hen ... probative force of evidence depends on the circumstances in which it was obtained and those circumstances raise a possibility of fraud, indications of conscientious police work will enhance probative force and slovenly work will diminish it. Kyles, 514 U.S. at 446 n. 15, 115 S.Ct. 1555. Defendant now claims that he obtained supplementary reports, after trial, which suggest that an officer left the scene of the car crash immediately after defendant was apprehended and went to the murder scene before photographs of the contents of defendant's pockets were taken. From this, defendant theorizes that the contents of his pockets were not immediately photographed following his arrest, and that the state elicited perjured testimony from the officer to establish that no one had tampered with this evidence. A fair reading of the supplemental reports reveals no contradiction between them and the officers' testimony. [14] Five officers testified that the seizure of evidence from defendant occurred before any of them went to the murder scene, and defendant has not presented any evidence to contradict this testimony. Therefore, there was no exculpatory or impeaching evidence requiring disclosure to the defense revealed in the reports.