State v. Jordan
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The Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the court of appeals rejecting Defendant's claim for ineffective assistance of counsel, holding that a factfinder may consider extrinsic evidence of the sexual purpose of a person charged with producing a visual depiction of murder.
Defendant was convicted of thirty-three counts of child sex crimes, including aggravated sexual abuse of a child and forcible sodomy of a child. On appeal, Defendant argued that the trial counsel was ineffective based on his failure to object to the prosecutor's request that the jury consider Defendant's subjective intentions in deciding whether Exhibits 21 and 22 - two photographs obtained from Defendant's laptop - qualified as child pornography under Utah law. The court of appeals concluded that Defendant had asserted a successful claim for ineffective assistance of counsel with respect to Exhibit 22 but not Exhibit 21 and reversed Defendant's conviction based on Exhibit 22. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that Defendant did not identify a basis for challenging the State's invitation for the jury to consider Defendant's subjective intention in creating an image that qualified as child pornography as a depiction of child nudity for the purpose of sexual arousal under Utah Code 76-5b-103(10)(f).
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