The Wyoming Supreme Court held that digital penetration and use of a sexual device qualify as explicit sexual conduct under the child-exploitation statute and upheld an aggregate 21-to-30-year sentence.
The Wyoming Supreme Court upheld a bicycle stop based on an objectively reasonable factual mistake and refused to review issues not specifically preserved in a conditional plea.
The Wyoming Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the denial of Christopher Campbell’s motion to suppress evidence seized from his Evanston residence, holding that Deputy Barker’s search-warrant affidavit established probable cause under the totality-of-circumstances test. The court rejected Campbell’s paragraph-by-paragraph critique of the affidavit as methodologically improper: Wyoming law requires courts to evaluate the affidavit as a whole, not in piecemeal fashion. Viewed in its totality, a convergence of circumstantial links—a matching U-Haul seen at the residence, receipts tying an associate to both the truck and the address, Arizona connections shared by the stolen vehicle and the occupants, and matching tire tracks—established the required nexus between the evidence sought and the place to be searched.
The Wyoming Supreme Court reversed and remanded a criminal case in which the district court ordered the defendant to sell a vehicle and deposit the proceeds as a condition of maintaining his public defender appointment. The court held that the subsequent guilty plea did not waive the challenge because the issue was unrelated to guilt or conviction, and that the district court exceeded its statutory authority under Wyoming’s public defender reimbursement statute by compelling a pre-sentencing forced asset liquidation.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed the denial of self-defense immunity to a man who shot and killed his neighbor during a dispute over property boundaries, holding that Wyoming’s castle doctrine presumptions under § 6-2-602(b) and (d) do not extend to outdoor areas such as driveways, and that a defendant’s subjective belief that an intruder was about to enter his home — without objective corroboration — is insufficient to trigger the statutory presumptions.