State v. Rogers (2025 S.D. 18): SDCL 23A-37-15 Violations Do Not Create Due Process or Spoliation Relief Absent Apparent Exculpatory Value or Bad Faith

1. Introduction

State v. Rogers arises from the January 22, 2022 shooting death of Destiny Rogers in her home in Spearfish, South Dakota. Dreau Lester Rogers (Defendant/Appellant) was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder and related firearm offenses and received a life sentence. The State of South Dakota (Plaintiff/Appellee) prosecuted on the theory that Rogers shot his wife at close range with a .45 caliber handgun found concealed on his property.

Rogers’s trial defense centered on third-party perpetration: he immediately identified Donovan Derrek as the shooter and argued that Derrek’s phone location data would have shown Derrek’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. A key appellate dispute concerned police handling of Derrek’s phone—specifically, that it was returned to Derrek without the statutory notice required by SDCL 23A-37-15, after which Derrek disposed of it.

Key issues

• Sufficiency: Whether the circuit court erred in denying a motion for judgment of acquittal.
• Due process: Whether the State violated the Fourteenth Amendment by returning Derrek’s phone before it had been properly extracted, thereby losing potentially exculpatory location evidence.
• Spoliation instruction: Whether the jury should have been instructed to draw an adverse inference from the phone’s loss.

2. Summary of the Opinion

3. Analysis

3.1 Precedents Cited

A. Sufficiency of the evidence and the role of the jury

• State v. Seidel: The Court used Seidel to restate the familiar appellate lens—recounting evidence “in a light most favorable to the jury’s verdict”—thereby framing Rogers’s factual challenges as largely matters of weight and credibility, not appellate reweighing.
• State v. Harruff (quoting State v. Klaudt) and quoting State v. Brim: These cases supplied the de novo standard for reviewing the denial of a judgment of acquittal and the “any rational trier of fact” test. They also reinforced that appellate courts accept evidence and favorable inferences supporting the verdict, not competing interpretations.
• State v. Manning: Cited for the proposition that the jury is the “exclusive judge” of credibility and weight, undercutting Rogers’s “five facts” argument insofar as it invited the Supreme Court to reassess witness truthfulness and investigative quality as dispositive of guilt.

B. Substantive murder law (mens rea)

• State v. Little Long: Provided the definitional frame for second-degree murder under SDCL 22-16-7—an imminently dangerous act evincing a depraved mind without premeditated design.
• State v. Larson: Used to clarify “depraved mind” as a mens rea less culpable than premeditation, supporting the doctrinal distinction between the acquitted first-degree count and the sustained second-degree conviction.

C. Due process access-to-evidence doctrine (Brady / Trombetta / Youngblood)

• State v. Zephier: Functioned as the Court’s primary South Dakota synthesis of access-to-evidence doctrine, distinguishing two lines: (1) identifiable, intact suppressed evidence (the Brady v. Maryland line) and (2) lost/destroyed/compromised evidence (the California v. Trombetta / Arizona v. Youngblood line). It also supplied the key caution that violating SDCL 23A-37-15 does not “reflexively” create a due process violation.
• California v. Trombetta (and U.S. v. Valenzuela-Bernal): The Court adopted Trombetta’s two-part materiality test for lost evidence: the evidence must have (i) apparent exculpatory value before destruction and (ii) be of such a nature that comparable evidence cannot be obtained by other reasonably available means. Valenzuela-Bernal appeared in the doctrinal background as part of the Supreme Court’s “access to evidence” development.
• Brady v. Maryland and State v. Birdshead: Cited to distinguish the Brady category (materiality-focused; good/bad faith irrelevant) from the lost-evidence category where the exculpatory value is unknown.
• Arizona v. Youngblood: Controlled the “potentially useful evidence” scenario: if evidence might have yielded exonerating results but its exculpatory value is not apparent, the defendant must prove bad faith to establish a due process violation.
• State v. Jackson: Used for two points: (i) once Trombetta materiality is shown, failure to preserve can be a due process violation, and (ii) lack of evidence that the State acted to gain a tactical advantage or suppress exculpatory evidence undermines a bad-faith claim.
• State v. Bousum (quoting State v. Steffes): Provided the operative bad-faith definition in South Dakota for destroyed evidence: deliberate destruction by or at the direction of a state agent with intent to deprive the defense and thwart it; mere negligence is not enough.

D. Spoliation and jury instructions

• State v. Black Cloud (quoting State v. Schumacher): Set the general standard—trial courts have discretion over wording and arrangement of instructions; review is for abuse of discretion.
• State v. Engesser: Supplied the requirements for a spoliation adverse-inference instruction: substantial evidence that the item existed, was under control of the party, would have been admissible, and was destroyed intentionally and in bad faith. It also emphasized the cautionary nature of spoliation: only intentional destruction fits the “admission by conduct” rationale.
• State v. Zephier: Beyond due process doctrine, it also informed the remedial path: the Court approved giving a “statutory noncompliance” instruction letting the jury decide the significance of returning seized property without a court order.

3.2 Legal Reasoning

A. Why the evidence was sufficient despite “investigative defects”

Rogers framed five themes—statutory violations, release of evidence, contamination, weak alibi, and omissions—as collectively proving reasonable doubt. The Court treated these primarily as jury arguments about credibility and weight, not as legal insufficiency. Under State v. Harruff, the appellate question is whether a rational juror could find the elements beyond a reasonable doubt when viewing the evidence favorably to the prosecution—not whether investigators performed ideally.

The Court emphasized forensic and circumstantial evidence that supported the State’s theory: (i) autopsy testimony indicating a close-contact shot (barrel “very close” and marks consistent with barrel contact), (ii) Destiny’s DNA on the tip of the .45’s barrel, (iii) Rogers’s DNA on the grip, holster, magazine, and cartridges, and (iv) Rogers’s fingerprint on the spent .45 casing near the body. Coupled with prior threats (October 2020 texts) and gun-seeking messages (June 2021), the record allowed a rational juror to reject third-party perpetration.

B. Due process: why the phone evidence did not meet Trombetta materiality

The doctrinal pivot was classification: this was not a Brady v. Maryland suppression case (intact, identifiable evidence withheld), but a lost/compromised evidence case where the content was unknown because the phone was returned and later destroyed.

The Court held Rogers failed California v. Trombetta because the “apparent exculpatory value” of Derrek’s phone location data was not established before its loss. Derrek’s statements that “check my phone” were read as pointing to exculpation of Derrek (and likely the text-message timeline), not as clearly exculpatory for Rogers.

Critically, the Court treated the value of “precise location data” as speculative: it required a “complex chain of assumptions” (phone model/tool support; enabled apps; stored historical location; extractability; accuracy; and contradiction of existing alibi evidence). That chain did not make exculpatory value “apparent” pre-destruction, so the more demanding Youngblood bad-faith requirement applied.

C. Due process: why the record did not show bad faith

Applying State v. Bousum and the quoted definition from State v. Steffes, the Court found negligence but not deliberate conduct intended to thwart the defense. Detective Hofman testified he did not read the extraction report until months later and returned the phone believing Derrek was not involved, and without knowing extraction had failed. Under State v. Jackson, the Court found no evidence of a calculated tactical advantage.

Rogers attempted to infer bad faith from a separate, earlier suppression ruling concerning an intentional Sixth Amendment violation involving a recorded jail visit. The Supreme Court rejected temporal proximity alone as insufficient to link the two actions into a bad-faith scheme regarding the phone.

D. Spoliation instruction: why Instruction 48 was sufficient

Under State v. Engesser, spoliation requires intentional, bad-faith destruction. Because the Court found no bad faith on the phone’s return, it concluded a spoliation inference was unwarranted.

The circuit court instead gave an instruction (Instruction 48) based on State v. Zephier, informing jurors that law enforcement must keep seized evidence and must not dispose of it without a court order, while leaving to the jury whether the phone’s return bore on guilt/innocence and what weight to give it. The Supreme Court viewed this as an appropriate remedial measure alongside broad cross-examination about SDCL 23A-37-15 noncompliance.

3.3 Impact

• Statutory violations are not self-executing constitutional violations. The decision reinforces State v. Zephier: violating SDCL 23A-37-15 (failure to notify before returning seized property) does not automatically yield due process relief or exclusion; defendants must still satisfy the constitutional frameworks of California v. Trombetta or Arizona v. Youngblood.
• Digital-evidence speculation will not satisfy Trombetta. As location evidence increasingly features in third-party perpetrator defenses, State v. Rogers makes clear that conjecture about what a device “might” contain—without showing apparent exculpatory value—will likely be treated as “potentially useful” at most, triggering the hard-to-prove bad-faith requirement.
• Spoliation remains a high bar in criminal cases. The Court reaffirmed that spoliation instructions are exceptional, tied to intentional bad-faith destruction, not investigative mistakes or negligent evidence handling.
• Practical trial-level remedy: Zephier-type instruction and cross-examination. The opinion signals that, where statutory noncompliance occurs but bad faith is not shown, trial courts may address the issue by permitting robust cross-examination and providing a neutral “you may consider it” instruction rather than an adverse-inference presumption.

4. Complex Concepts Simplified

• Judgment of acquittal (insufficient evidence): A request for the judge to end the case because no reasonable jury could convict. On appeal, courts view the evidence in the way most favorable to the verdict and do not re-decide witness credibility.
• Brady evidence (Brady v. Maryland): Evidence the prosecution has and fails to disclose even though it is favorable and “material.” In Brady cases, the prosecutor’s intent (good or bad faith) is not the focus; materiality is.
• Lost/destroyed evidence: Trombetta vs. Youngblood:
  • California v. Trombetta applies when the exculpatory value was apparent before the evidence was lost and comparable evidence can’t reasonably be obtained elsewhere.
  • Arizona v. Youngblood applies when the evidence is only “potentially useful” (it might have helped, but its exculpatory value wasn’t apparent). Then the defendant must prove bad faith by law enforcement.
• Bad faith (in this context): Not mere mistake or carelessness. It means deliberate destruction (or release) intended to deprive the defense of evidence and thwart the defense’s case.
• Spoliation instruction: A jury instruction allowing jurors to infer that destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to the party who destroyed it. In South Dakota criminal cases, it requires intentional, bad-faith destruction (not negligence).
• CDR (call detail records) vs. phone location history: CDRs typically show cell-tower connections and can suggest general area but rarely pinpoint precise location. Phone-stored location history (if it exists and is extractable) can sometimes be more precise, but may depend on device type, user settings, and app permissions.

5. Conclusion

State v. Rogers is a significant South Dakota decision at the intersection of third-party perpetrator defenses and missing digital evidence. The Court reaffirmed that appellate review of sufficiency does not revisit credibility disputes, and it strengthened the doctrinal boundary between statutory evidence-handling violations and constitutional due process remedies.

Most importantly, the opinion underscores two demanding thresholds for defendants seeking relief from lost digital evidence: (1) to avoid the bad-faith requirement, the defense must show the evidence’s exculpatory value was apparent before it was lost under California v. Trombetta; otherwise, (2) the defendant must prove bad faith under Arizona v. Youngblood. Parallelly, spoliation instructions remain limited to intentional, bad-faith destruction under State v. Engesser, with Zephier-type “statutory noncompliance” instructions serving as a measured alternative where negligence is shown.