Under both the 4th Amendment and the Indiana Constitution, officer safety permitted a second pat-down search of motorist stopped for traffic infraction after officer reasonably suspected motorist might be armed, had him exit the vehicle, and found ammunition on his person in the initial pat-down and more ammunition in the vehicle.
Criminal
Dawson v. State, No. 49A02-1001-CR-155, __ N.E.2d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Dec. 17, 2010)
Post-Conviction Rule 2 applies only to belated appeals of convictions or sentences and accordingly does not allow a belated appeal of a probation revocation.
Deloney v. State, No. 22A01-0906-CR-273, __ N.E.2d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Dec. 17, 2010)
DNA evidence is not sufficiently relevant to be admissible when the defendant “could not be excluded from a possibly infinite number of people matching the crime-scene DNA and the DNA expert cannot offer a statistical probability whether the crime scene DNA came from the defendant.”
State v. West, No. 45A03-1003-PC-213, __ N.E.2d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Dec. 20, 2010)
When the trial transcript was not completed by the date of the P-C.R. hearing, the P-C.R. court did not err in admitting the “then-unavailable transcript” into evidence, with the consent of State and the petitioner, at the hearing in anticipation of its being admitted after completion.
Galloway v. State, No. 33S01-1004-CR-163, __ N.E.2d __ (Ind., Dec. 22, 2010)
Reverses bench trial rejection of insanity defense because, despite “nonconflicting expert and lay opinion that defendant . . .was insane, the trial court rejected the insanity defense after concluding that the defendant could continue to be a danger to society because of an inadequate State mental health system.”