Denver A. Youngblood, JR. v. West Virginia (547 U.S. 867)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 19, 2006 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 547 U.S. 867 · 126 S. Ct. 2188
- Decided
- June 19, 2006
- Term
- October Term 2005
- Vote
- 6–3
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Vacated and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Per Curiam. In April 2001, the State of West Virginia indicted petitioner Denver A. Youngblood, Jr., on charges including abduction of three young women, Katara, Kimberly, and Wendy, and two instances of sexual assault upon Katara. The cases went to trial in 2003 in the Circuit Court of Morgan County, where a jury convicted Youngblood of two counts of sexual assault, two counts of brandishing a firearm, and one count of indecent exposure. The conviction rested principally on the testimony of the three women that they were held captive by Youngblood and a friend of his, statements by Katara that she was forced at gunpoint to perform oral sex on Youngblood, and evidence consistent with a claim by Katara about disposal of certain physical evidence of their sexual encounter. Youngblood was sentenced to a combined term of 26 to 60 years’ imprisonment, with 25 to 60 of those years directly attributable to the sexual-assault convictions. Several months after being sentenced, Youngblood moved to set aside the verdict. He claimed that an investigator working on his case had uncovered new and exculpatory evidence, in the form of a graphically explicit note that both squarely contradicted the State’s account of the incidents and directly supported Youngblood’s consensual-sex defense. The note, apparently written by Kimberly and Wendy, taunted Youngblood and his friend for having been…
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