People of Michigan v. Dangelo Ladonn McWilliams

Michigan Supreme Court Lansing, Michigan

Megan K. Cavanagh, Chief Justice Brian K. Zahra Richard H. Bernstein Elizabeth M. Welch Kyra H. Bolden Kimberly A. Thomas Noah P. Hood,

Justices

Order

September 17, 2026

SC: 169425

COA: 376585

Washtenaw CC: 20-000433-FC

PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v

DANGELO LADONN MCWILLIAMS, also known as DANGELO LANDONN

MCWILLIAMS,

Defendant-Appellant. By order of March 6, 2026, plaintiff was directed to answer the application for leave to appeal the November 17, 2025 order of the Court of Appeals. On order of the Court, the answer having been received, the application for leave to appeal is again considered, and it is DENIED, because we are not persuaded that the question presented should be reviewed by this Court.

WELCH, J. (concurring).

In this interlocutory appeal, defendant challenges a practice formerly employed by the Ypsilanti Police Department (YPD) of recording and then deleting interviews with complaining witnesses in sexual assault and domestic violence cases. Defendant argues that the destruction of this potentially exculpatory evidence violated his due process rights. See generally Arizona v Youngblood, 488 US 51 (1988). However, the trial court rejected this claim, concluding that there was no evidence that the recordings were deleted in bad faith.

Youngblood imposes a demanding standard for demonstrating bad faith. I write to highlight that other state supreme courts have declined to follow Youngblood when interpreting their own state constitutions. I believe there is merit to this approach and that this Court should consider whether to follow suit.

Defendant faces multiple sex crime charges, stemming from conduct that allegedly occurred while he was living in a fraternity house at Eastern Michigan University.

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According to the detectives who investigated this case, YPD had a practice of recording interviews with complaining witnesses in sexual assault and domestic violence cases.¹The detectives stated that the recordings were used to assist in drafting written reports. Once an interview report was completed, however, the detectives would then delete the related recording.

Once these facts came to light, defendant moved to dismiss the charges against him, arguing that these recordings were potentially useful evidence and their destruction violated his due process rights. After holding an evidentiary hearing where the detective in question testified, the trial court denied defendant's motion to dismiss. It concluded that defendant failed to establish that the detective acted in bad faith or that the recordings would have been helpful to the defense, and thus defendant could not establish a due process violation under Youngblood. See Youngblood, 488 US at 58 ("[U]nless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law.").²Defendant filed an interlocutory application for leave to appeal, which the Court of Appeals denied. See People v McWilliams, unpublished order of the Court of Appeals, entered November 17, 2025 (Docket No. 376585).

Although the trial court applied Youngblood here, there appears to be no Michigan caselaw describing when the bad faith standard is actually satisfied. Furthermore, other jurisdictions applying Youngblood have almost never found the bad faith standard to be met. See Chen, The Youngblood Success Stories: Overcoming the "Bad Faith" Destruction of Evidence Standard, 109 W Va L Rev 421, 422 (2007) ("According to this author's research, there are 1,675 published cases that have cited Youngblood to date but only seven reported cases where bad faith has been found."); Bawden, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow—Three Common Mistakes Courts Make When Police Lose or Destroy Evidence With Apparent Exculpatory Value, 48 Clev St L Rev 335, 350 n 76 (2000) (finding "only three post-Youngblood cases where bad faith was present"). See also Bay, Old Blood, Bad Blood, and Youngblood: Due Process, Lost Evidence, and the Limits of Bad Faith, 86 Wash U L Rev 241, 247 (2008) ("[T]he bad faith standard imposes an almost insurmountable burden upon the accused."). The YPD policy here raises serious questions. But against this legal backdrop, I cannot fault the trial court for declining to find that the YPD detectives acted in bad faith on the record before it.

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The debate about whether "bad faith" exists on the facts of this case reveals the problems with Youngblood: it focuses the due process analysis on whether the police officers' actions satisfied some unspecified level of misconduct. However, " '[f]airness dictates that when a person's liberty is at stake, the sole fact of whether the police or another state official acted in good or bad faith in failing to preserve evidence cannot be determinative of whether the criminal defendant received due process of law.' " Illinois v Fisher, 540 US 544, 550 n * (Stevens, J., concurring in the judgment), quoting State v Morales, 232 Conn 707, 723 (1995) (alteration in Fisher). See also State v Delisle, 162 Vt 293, 310 (1994) (criticizing Youngblood "because it limits due process violations to only those cases in which a defendant can demonstrate bad faith, even though the negligent loss of evidence may critically prejudice a defendant"). Recognizing this, a number of other state supreme courts have declined to adopt the Youngblood bad faith standard as a matter of state constitutional law. See Fisher, 540 US at 550 n * (collecting cases); Morales, 232 Conn at 725-726 (same); Bay, 86 Wash U L Rev at 246-247 (reporting that 10 state supreme courts have rejected the bad faith standard as a matter of state constitutional law).³ Michigan has neither adopted nor rejected this approach.⁴

In an appropriate case, I would be open to considering if, even in the absence of bad faith, the loss or destruction of evidence may violate a defendant's right to due process under Article 1, § 17 of the Michigan Constitution. Here, however, defendant has not

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I, Elizabeth Kingston-Miller, Clerk of the Michigan Supreme Court, certify that the foregoing is a true and complete copy of the order entered at the direction of the Court. September 17, 2026

s0915

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Clerk raised a claim under Michigan's Constitution.⁵Accordingly, I concur with the Court's decision to deny leave to appeal, but believe this Court should be open to considering how destruction-of-evidence claims should be considered under the Michigan Constitution.

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