Issue: What overarching issue was the court addressing or resolving (one question

Facts: What are the facts.

Rule of Law: which amendment was used and why AND Which italicized cases were mentioned

* include the actual statutes, constitutional amendments or cases the Court applies the facts THE OTHER ITALIZES CASES and AMENDMENT IS USED

Application- how did the court apply the rule to the facts?

*application section should be how the Court applied the facts to the law

Conclusion: what result did the court reach and WHY?

682 CONSTITUTION ARIZONA V. YOUNGBLOOD 488 U.S. 51, 109 S. Ct. 333, 102 L. Ed.2d 281 (1988) [Citations and footnotes omitted.] [The victim, a 10-year-old boy, was abducted, molested, and sodomized by a middle-aged man. Af- ter the assault, he was taken to a hospital where a phy- sician used a swab from a "sexual assault kit" to collect samples of the perpetrator's semen. The sam- ple taken was insufficient for adequate testing. The police failed to refrigerate the boy's clothing, which also contained semen. As a result, police criminolo gists were unable to obtain information about the identity of the boy's assailant. The boy identified the respondent. Defense experts testified at the trial that respondent might have been completely exoner- ated by timely performance of tests on properly pre- served semen samples. Respondent was convicted of child molestation, sexual assault, and kidnapping. The Arizona Court of Appeals reversed the convic- tion on the ground that the State had breached a con- stitutional duty to preserve the semen samples from the victim's body and clothing.] Chief Justice REHNQUIST delivered the opin- ion of the Court.Chief Justice REHNQUIST delivered the opin- ion of the Court. Decision of this case requires us to again con- sider "what might loosely be called the area of constitutionally-guaranteed access to evidence." In Brady v. Maryland we held "that the suppress sion by the prosecution of evidence favorable to the accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution." In United States v. Agurs, we held that the prosecution had a duty to disclose some evidence of this description even though no requests were made for it, but at the same time we rejected the notion that a "prosecu tor has a constitutional duty routinely to deliver his entire file to defense counsel." There is no question but that the State complied with Brady and Agurs here. The State disclosedThe Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as interpreted in Brady, makes the good or bad faith of the State irrele- vant when the State fails to disclose to the defendant material exculpatory evidence. Butrelevant police reports to respondent, which con- tained information about the existence of the swab and the clothing, and the boy's examination at the hospital. The State provided respondent's expert with the laboratory reports and notes prepared by the police criminologist, and respondent's ex- pert had access to the swab and to the clothing. If respondent is to prevail on federal constitu- tional grounds, then, it must be because of some constitutional duty over and above that imposed by cases such as Brady and Agurs. Our most recent decision in this area of the law, California v. Trombetta, arose out of a drunk driving prosecu tion in which the State had introduced test results indicating the concentration of alcohol in the blood of two motorists. The defendants sought to suppress the test results on the ground that the State had failed to preserve the breath samples used in the test. We rejected this argument for sev. cral reasons: first, "the officers here were acting in "good faith and in accord with their normal prac- tice" ": second, in the light of the procedures actu- ally used the chances that preserved samples would have exculpated the defendants were slim; and, third, even if the samples might have shown inaccuracy in the tests, the defendants had "alter- native means of demonstrating their innocence." In the present case, the likelihood that the pre- served materials would have enabled the defendant to exonerate himself appears to be greater than it was in Trombetta, but here, unlike in Trombetta, the State did not attempt to make any use of the materials in its own case in chief.The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as interpreted in Brady, makes the good or bad faith of the State irrelevant when the State fails to disclose to the defendant material ex- culpatory evidence. But we think the Due Process Clause requires a different result when we deal with the failure of the State to preserve evidentiary ma- terial of which no more can be said than that it could have been subjected to tests, the results of which might have exonerated the defendant. Part of the reason for the difference in treatment is found in the observation made by the Court in Trombetta that "[whenever potentially exculpatory evidence is permanently lost, courts face the treacherous task of divining the import of materials whose contents are unknown and, very often, disputed." Part of itIn this ease. the police collected the rectal swab and clothing on the night of the crime: respondent was not taken into custody until six weeks later. The failure of the police to refrigerate the clothing and to perfonn tests on the semen samples can at worst he described as negligent. None of this infor- mation was concealed from respondent at trial. and 1he evidencesuch as it waswas made available to respondent's expert who declined to pct'fonn any tests on the samples. The Arizona Court of Appeals noted in its opinionend we agreethat there was no suggestion of bad faith on the part of lhe police. It follows, therefore, Erom what we have said. that there was no violation ut'the Due Process Clause. The ArizonaCourt oFAppealsalso referred somewhat obliquely to the State's \"inability to quantitatively test" certain semen samples we think the Due Process Clause requires a different result when we deal with the fail- ure of the State to preserve evidentiary mate- rial of which no more can be said than that it could have been subjected to tests, the results of which might have exonerated the defen- dant. Part of the reason for the difference in treatment is found in the observation made by the Court in Trombetta that "[ whenever potentially exculpatory evidence is perma- nently lost, courts face the treacherous task of divining the import of materials whose con- tents are unknown and, very often, disputed." Part of it stems from our unwillingness to read the "fundamental fairness" requirement of the Due Process Clause as imposing on the police an undifferentiated and absolute duty to retain and to preserve all material that might be of conceivable evidentiary significance in a par- ticular prosecution. We think that requiring a defendant to show bad faith on the part of the police both limits the extent of the police's obligation to preserve evidence to reasonable bounds and confines it to that class of cases where the interests of justice most clearly require it, i.e., those cases in which the police themselves by their conduct indicate that the evidence could form a basis for exonerating the defendant. We therefore hold that unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve poten- tially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law