The Appellate Group

Miranda v. State

Miranda v. State, 2026 UT App 91 (Orme, J.)

Criminal Law

The Utah Court of Appeals held:

(1) There is no rebuttable presumption of prejudice for unpreserved unanimity instruction issues in a PCRA petition. The defendant bears the burden of satisfying the Strickland prejudice standard. 
(2) Geographical links in multi-count cases can alleviate prejudice from the lack of unanimity instruction because if the jury was unanimously persuaded that the conduct occurred at all of the locations they likely would have also agreed on the type of conduct that occurred at each location.

Read the full court opinion