Due process; Testimony about lost evidence; MRE 1004; People v Amison; Failure to preserve potentially exculpatory evidence; Arizona v Youngblood; Bad faith; Negative inference instruction; People v Davis; Prosecutorial misconduct; Appeals to juror sympathy; Waiver; Curative instruction; Ineffective assistance of counsel; Expert testimony; Forensic evidence; Life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for a 21-year-old offender; Miller v Alabama; Cruel &/or unusual punishment; People v Adamowicz; Juror misconduct; Jury instructions; Cumulative error; Unfair prejudice

Finding no errors requiring reversal, the court affirmed defendant’s convictions. She was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and mutilation of a dead body, for a brutal murder that went unsolved for 20 years. She was sentenced to LWOP for her murder and conspiracy convictions and 23 to 120 months for mutilation of a dead body. On appeal, the court first found that because there was no evidence of bad faith or intentional suppression regarding the loss of her police interview recording, which she conceded was only potentially useful, there was no due process violation. Next, because “the trial court’s instruction cured any potential prejudicial effect of the prosecutor’s statements” defendant could not prove prosecutorial misconduct. She also failed to demonstrate the requisite prejudice to successfully make an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. In addition, she failed to show that an objection to forensic testimony would have led to a ruling against the experts’ qualifications or provide any evidence showing that a forensic report was inaccurate or would not have been admissible but for counsel’s stipulation. Further, defendant’s (who was 21 at the time of the offense) mandatory LWOP sentence was “not prohibited by the United States or Michigan Constitution; the line has been drawn at 17 for purposes of the federal constitution and 18 for purposes of the state constitution.” Moreover, because she did not present “any evidence that a juror was exposed to improper extrinsic information about her trial during the trial, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by denying [her] motion for a new trial.” And that “the judge misspoke by referring to the second-degree murder portion of the open murder instructions as ‘Count 2,’ when considered within the context of the instructions as a whole [did] not somehow make the instructions inherently misleading.” Finally, because the “lack of prejudice was not even a close question with respect to any of defendant’s” alleged errors, she was “not entitled to appellate relief based on cumulative error.”