Ethan Thomas Hughes v. Commonwealth of Kentucky

Summary

The court reversed Hughes’s rape conviction because the trial court abused its discretion by admitting a hospital photograph of the twelve-year-old victim holding her newborn child; the photograph was irrelevant to whether Hughes believed she was sixteen and the error was not harmless. The court found no error in excluding additional testimony from a detective and cautioned against the jury instruction’s unnecessary burden-of-proof language, while declining to address the unpreserved pretrial witness examination. Justice Abramson, dissenting, would have affirmed because the photograph was relevant to Hughes’s mistaken-age defense and was not unfairly prejudicial.