When Evidence Disappears: What Commonwealth v. Judy Church Teaches Us About Due Process and Destroyed Evidence

In Commonwealth v. Judy Church, a March 2025 decision from the Essex County Superior Court, Judge Jeffrey Karp ruled against the defendant’s motion to suppress key toxicology evidence on the grounds that critical physical samples had been destroyed before the defense had an opportunity to inspect or retest them. This ruling, while not surprising under current Massachusetts precedent, highlights the persistent imbalance in access to forensic evidence and the challenges criminal defense attorneys face when key material vanishes before a case ever reaches trial.

Judy Church stands accused of murdering her partner by poisoning him with ethylene glycol, a toxic compound found in antifreeze. Police executed a search warrant at Church’s Salisbury apartment in November 2022 and seized several containers holding orange liquid, including a Powerade bottle, a Rain-X de-icer container, and a can of orange soda. Portions of the contents from each were sent to NMS Labs, a private toxicology laboratory in Pennsylvania, which confirmed the presence of ethylene glycol in two of the three samples.

The defense’s motion sought to exclude all evidence stemming from the NMS testing, citing due process violations and violations of Rule 14 of the Massachusetts Rules of Criminal Procedure. Their argument rested on a simple but powerful principle: Ms. Church was entitled to inspect and potentially retest the chemical samples that underpinned the Commonwealth’s murder charge. But by the time her attorneys requested access, the remaining sample material had been discarded by NMS Labs, consistent with its routine retention policy.

So the question became: Did the destruction of those samples violate Ms. Church’s constitutional rights? And if so, what is the remedy?

The court’s ruling, while adverse to the defense, walks through the framework Massachusetts courts use when evaluating claims of destroyed or lost evidence. There are, essentially, two avenues available to defendants who seek exclusion on this basis. First, if a defendant can show there’s a “reasonable possibility, based on concrete evidence,” that the destroyed material was exculpatory, then the court conducts a balancing test—considering prejudice, materiality, and the government’s culpability. Second, even if the defense cannot make that initial showing, they may still obtain relief if the destruction was the result of bad faith or reckless conduct by the Commonwealth.

Here, the court found that Church failed to meet the threshold requirement under the first avenue. There was simply no evidence that re-testing the samples would have produced different results. It was speculative, the judge reasoned, to assume that the leftover milliliters—small remnants not consumed in the original testing—would contain materially different chemical readings. That speculative possibility, in the court’s view, didn’t rise to the level of “concrete evidence” needed to trigger due process protections.

The ruling also rejected the second path to relief—namely, the suggestion that the government’s conduct was reckless or in bad faith. While the court conceded that the Commonwealth had no formal system in place to preserve leftover samples or retrieve them from NMS Labs, it nonetheless concluded that the conduct was merely negligent, not reckless. Importantly, the state still retained the original containers from Church’s home, each of which contained enough orange liquid for further testing. This fact proved fatal to the defense's argument. In Judge Karp’s view, the continued availability of untested liquid undercut any claim that the government had wholly deprived Church of the opportunity to conduct her own analysis.

From a defense attorney’s standpoint, however, the decision raises troubling implications. While it’s true that other liquid remains in the original containers, any argument that these are “equivalent” to the destroyed samples assumes that all parts of a container's contents are chemically identical—an assumption that may not hold true, particularly with complex fluids that may separate, degrade, or react over time. What if the portion originally tested had settled or contained trace elements not found in the remaining volume? What if the testing process itself—unexamined due to lack of preserved solvent—introduced errors that can now never be challenged? These are not hypothetical concerns in a criminal prosecution hinging on parts-per-million differences in toxicology readings.

Moreover, the lab’s own policy—which was clearly disclosed in their reports—warned that unless alternate arrangements were made, the samples would be destroyed after one year. Yet it appears that no one in the Commonwealth’s chain of custody, including the State Police and the Essex DA’s office, acted to preserve or retrieve the leftovers during that year. That systemic failure—arguably more than negligence—effectively shut the defense out of any independent scientific examination.

In that sense, the case becomes a broader commentary on the persistent procedural disadvantage defendants face when dealing with scientific evidence. The prosecution gets the first bite at the apple, hiring the lab, framing the analysis, and shaping the narrative. The defense, if they even learn of the evidence’s existence in time, often finds that the evidence has already been consumed or discarded, foreclosing any meaningful challenge. And when courts adopt a narrow, highly deferential standard—as they did here—for determining whether destroyed evidence might be exculpatory, they tacitly endorse a system in which oversight and accountability depend entirely on the government’s own diligence.

The court’s denial of Church’s Rule 14 argument further illustrates the difficulty of obtaining remedies for lost evidence. Rule 14 requires prosecutors to notify the defense promptly when evidence is destroyed. There’s no dispute that destruction occurred here, nor that the defense learned of it only after the fact. But Judge Karp found that the prejudice to the defendant was “minimal” because the original containers still existed. He declined to impose exclusion, instead suggesting that the defense may be allowed to make a Bowden argument at trial—a reference to Commonwealth v. Bowden, which permits the defense to argue that police failed to adequately investigate the case.

But while a Bowden defense is useful, it is not a substitute for access to the evidence itself. It allows the jury to draw negative inferences from the Commonwealth’s investigation, but it does nothing to restore what has been lost. And in practice, courts are often reluctant to let defense attorneys argue that missing evidence undermines the state's case unless they can show real, measurable harm—which, of course, becomes almost impossible when the very material that might prove that harm is gone.

Ultimately, the Church ruling is a textbook example of how the legal system processes claims of destroyed evidence—not as questions of justice or fairness, but as exercises in formal burdens and narrow standards. As defense attorneys, we understand the court’s need to preserve prosecutorial flexibility and avoid trial delays caused by routine lab policies. But we must also confront the reality that a system which allows key forensic material to be destroyed without any consequence creates real risks of wrongful conviction.

This is especially true in cases involving complex scientific testing—like toxicology, DNA analysis, or ballistics—where the methodology, calibration, and human error all play critical roles. If the defense is denied access to the physical material that underlies the Commonwealth’s claims, it becomes impossible to perform the kind of robust cross-examination that the Constitution envisions. It effectively turns lab analysts into unassailable experts, whose conclusions are accepted without challenge.

The Church case is not over. Whether a jury will ultimately believe that she used antifreeze to commit murder remains to be seen. But her fight to obtain and examine the evidence used against her underscores a critical truth: in the criminal legal system, access to evidence is not merely a procedural issue—it is a cornerstone of the right to a fair trial.

For defense lawyers, this case is a wake-up call. It is imperative that we act quickly to preserve and inspect forensic evidence, demand clarity on laboratory retention policies, and hold the Commonwealth accountable for its evidence handling practices. We should be filing motions early in discovery, not waiting until the eve of trial. And we must be prepared to educate judges—many of whom have limited scientific backgrounds—about why these procedures matter.

Finally, we should push for systemic reform. Massachusetts needs clear, enforceable rules on forensic evidence retention. Laboratories, whether public or private, should not be permitted to destroy material that may become the subject of litigation, especially without documented efforts to notify both the prosecution and the defense. And prosecutors should bear the burden of ensuring that when they rely on private labs, they do not contract away the defendant’s ability to test the state’s case.

In the end, Commonwealth v. Judy Church may not change the law. But it reminds us that even in high-stakes cases, basic questions about fairness, access, and scientific transparency remain unresolved. As defense attorneys, it’s our job to keep asking those questions—loudly, persistently, and in every courtroom that will hear us.