res gestae
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Divided appeals court upholds Denver child sex assault conviction
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Colorado’s second-highest court upheld a man’s sex assault conviction earlier this month, although there was disagreement between appellate judges about whether jurors properly evaluated damaging evidence of the defendant’s conduct in light of his unusual defense at trial. A Denver jury convicted Mohammed Diawarra in 2021 for sexual assault on a child after he impregnated an…
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Appeals court declines to open door to challenges of already-final convictions
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Colorado’s second-highest court on Thursday declined to apply a major state Supreme Court decision retroactively and enable more people to challenge their criminal convictions. In 2022, the Supreme Court issued Rojas v. People – a decision that eliminated a “troublesome relic” from the rules of evidence. Known as the “res gestae” doctrine, it enabled prosecutors to introduce evidence…
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Unlawful arrest, questionable evidence leads to reversal of Pitkin County man’s convictions
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A Pitkin County judge improperly allowed evidence stemming from an unlawful arrest to be used at trial, and did not correctly instruct the jury about how to use a different set of evidence, the state’s Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday. The three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals that reviewed Jeremiah Daniel Casper’s case…
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Appeals court rules racist comments not proper evidence, overturns assault conviction
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A Pueblo County judge should not have allowed jurors to hear about the racist comments a defendant made toward his friend hours before allegedly assaulting his godson, the state’s Court of Appeals decided on Thursday. Anthony Joseph Ianne’s case had already proceeded through a three-judge panel of the appellate court, which upheld his conviction last…
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Appeals court tosses Denver sex abuse convictions for improper reference to porn searches
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The state’s second-highest court has reversed a man’s convictions for sexually assaulting a child after determining it was improper for prosecutors to rely on Juan Hernandez-Ramirez’s Internet searches for pornography after allegedly abusing the victim. A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals relied on a Colorado Supreme Court decision from earlier this year jettisoning a…
