Commonwealth v. Sasville

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• dismissing indictment where destruction of potentially exculpatory impeachment evidence deprived defendant of meaningful opportunity to cross-examine complainant
• fetal tissue from rape complainant’s abortion, available for genetic marker testing as evidence of identity of rapist, destroyed at Commonwealth’s direction
• “[I]n the absence of any concrete evidence . . . , the success of any impeachment would be remote, at best”
• dismissal of indictment should have been allowed where Commonwealth’s conduct in destroying evidence came close to bad faith
• “The worth of such [evidence] to establish conclusively [the guilt or innocence of the defendant] would be known to any professional in the criminal justice system”
• \The worth of such [evidence] to establish conclusively [the guilt or innocence of the defendant] would be known to any professional in the criminal justice system\

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).