US Supreme Court declines petition over evidence in 2015 Scottsdale murder
PHOENIX (AZFamily) — The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review an appeal over DNA evidence in a high-profile Scottsdale murder case that’s set to go to trial later this year.
The decision was announced on Monday regarding the case against Ian Mitcham, who’s accused of murdering Allison Feldman 10 years ago. The petition was filed after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in December that DNA evidence collected during a previous arrest could be used in the murder investigation.
Feldman was sexually assaulted, strangled, and beaten to death at her home in Scottsdale in February of 2015. DNA collected at the scene was inconclusive, and the case went cold for three years.
In 2018, investigators ran a familial DNA test that identified an Arizona prison inmate named Mark Mitcham as a close relative of the person whose DNA was found at the crime scene. The trail led to the inmate’s brother, Ian Mitcham.
Then, detectives seemingly made a break in the case. A sample of Ian Mitcham’s blood was already in Scottsdale PD’s evidence vault from a DUI case in January 2015 — a month before Feldman’s murder. It was tested against the DNA collected at Feldman’s home and reportedly came back as an exact match.
In April of 2018, Mitcham was arrested and charged with Feldman’s murder. But there was controversy over the DNA.
Defense attorneys filed a motion to suppress the evidence from the DUI case, arguing that Scottsdale police only had the DNA because the sample wasn’t destroyed three months after his arrest, as it should have been, thus violating his Fourth Amendment rights. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge agreed, and it was ruled inadmissible.
The state appealed, saying probable cause supported Mitcham’s arrest and the DNA profile was properly in police possession once he pleaded guilty to felony charges. Months after Mitcham was supposed to go on trial, an Arizona Court of Appeals judge reversed the lower court’s ruling in August 2023.
Mitcham’s attorneys appealed once again, and in May 2024, the Arizona Supreme Court granted the petition for review. After hearing arguments from both sides last September, the state’s high court affirmed the Court of Appeals ruling in December. While the court found that the collection of evidence in the DUI case did violate Mitcham’s Fourth Amendment rights, the ruling was upheld because justices say police would have discovered the DNA evidence “through lawful means untainted by the illegal search.”
In one last legal challenge over the DNA’s admissibility, the defense petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in February. The petition was denied on Monday.
Several hearings are scheduled in Mitcham’s case over the coming months, and his trial is tentatively set to begin in October.
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