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.
Wyoming’s high court held that vulnerable-adult exploitation spanning two counties could be tried in Converse County and affirmed restitution for clothing made inaccessible by the crime.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed Steven Randall Marler’s convictions on eight counts of sexual abuse and six counts of battery against children in his care, holding that the district court properly admitted broad Rule 404(b) “other acts” evidence of grooming rituals and a fear-based disciplinary regimen, that a victim’s collateral lie to a jail guard was excludable without violating the Confrontation Clause, that a rule-of-completeness claim was waived by failure to make an offer of proof, and that brief prosecutorial questioning about a victim’s father’s suicide did not constitute plain-error misconduct.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed a probation revocation, holding that the district court erred by determining willfulness during the adjudicatory phase rather than the dispositional phase—a clear violation of Wyoming’s two-part revocation framework—but that the error did not constitute plain error because Smith suffered no material prejudice: he presented his willfulness arguments before the court’s finding and again at disposition, and an independently established, uncontested violation independently supported revocation.
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.