In the case of Collins, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division v. Youngblood in 1989, the U.S Supreme Court ruled that unless a defendant can show bad faith on the part of police or prosecutors in failing to preserve potentially useful evidence for trial, there is no violation of due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Larry Youngblood was convicted for child molestation and kidnapping but appealed his conviction arguing that state officials had negligently failed to perform certain tests on physical evidence which could have possibly exonerated him. The court held that failure to preserve evidentiary material did not constitute a denial of due process unless it was shown that law enforcement acted with intent to suppress favorable evidence.

In the dissenting opinion for Collins v. Youngblood, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that the majority's decision to uphold a Texas law allowing courts to correct illegal sentences after they had been imposed was inconsistent with the Ex Post Facto Clause of the Constitution. He contended that this clause should be interpreted broadly to prohibit any law which alters punishment in a manner disadvantageous to defendants or changes rules of evidence in order to convict them more easily. In his view, by permitting corrections of sentencing errors at any time, even years later as happened in Youngblood's case, it unfairly subjects defendants who have already served their original sentence and reintegrated into society back into criminal proceedings without warning or preparation. This unpredictability undermines confidence in finality and fairness of judicial decisions while also causing undue hardship on affected individuals.