Does a defendant have to prove that the police acted in bad faith in failing to preserve or preserve potentially useful evidence?

If, however, the evidence was only potentially useful to the defensethat is, "evidentiary material of which no more can be said than that it could have been subjected to tests, the result of which might have exonerated the defendant" (Youngblood, supra, 488 U.S. at p. 57, italics added)then the defendant would also have to show that the government acted in bad faith in failing to preserve the evidence. (Illinois v. Fisher, supra, 540 U.S. at p. 549.) As the Youngblood court explained, a showing of bad faith for potentially useful evidence is necessary because the "'fundamental fairness'" requirement of the due process clause does not and should not impose on the police "an undifferentiated and absolute duty to retain and to preserve all material that might be of conceivable evidentiary significance in a particular prosecution. We think that requiring a defendant to show bad faith on the part of the police both limits the extent of the police's obligation to preserve evidence to reasonable bounds and confines it to that class of cases where the interests of justice most clearly require it, i.e., those cases in which the

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