State v. Rodriguez
State v. Rodriguez, 2026 UT App 34 (Orme, J.)
Criminal Law
The Utah Court of Appeals held:
- Trial counsel was not ineffective for (1) not moving for a directed verdict based on identity; (2) not seeking to strike fleeting and unexpected statement at trial because reasonable counsel could have believed it was ill- advised to call undue attention to the statement by objecting; and (3) for failing to request a reasonable-alternative-hypothesis jury instruction.
- The trial court did not err when it imposed a sentence without first resolving the claimed inaccuracies in the PSI because Defendant did not raise a specific inaccuracy in the PSI for the court to resolve, which is required to trigger the trial court’s statutory duty to resolve any alleged factual inaccuracies in the PSI.