State v. Cadotte

2026 S.D. 28
South Dakota Supreme Court·Decided May 13, 2026·No. 31148·Published

Opinion

#31148-a-MES 2026 S.D. 28

IN THE SUPREME COURT

OF THE

STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA

STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA, Plaintiff and Appellee, v.

TELL LOGAN CADOTTE, Defendant and Appellant.

APPEAL FROM THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE SEVENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT PENNINGTON COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA

THE HONORABLE ROBERT GUSINSKY Judge

MATTHEW R. MIRABELLA of South Dakota Office of Indigent Legal Services Sioux Falls, South Dakota Attorneys for defendant and appellant.

MARTY J. JACKLEY Attorney General

ROBERTO NOLASCO-CRUZ Legal Intern

SARAH THORNE Deputy Attorney General

ERIN E. HANDKE Assistant Attorney General Pierre, South Dakota Attorneys for plaintiff and appellee.

ARGUED

APRIL 21, 2026

OPINION FILED 05/13/26

SALTER, Justice [¶1.] A jury found Tell Cadotte guilty on nine counts of first-degree rape and one count of sexual contact with a person under the age of sixteen. Cadotte now appeals, arguing that the circuit court failed to provide him with a reasonable remedy to correct an alleged discovery violation and that the court admitted prejudicial hearsay over defense counsel’s objection. We affirm.

Factual and Procedural History [¶2.] On January 27, 2021, Tina Cadotte picked up A.R., her eight-year-old daughter, from school in Rapid City. Once at home, Tina and A.R. went to the bathroom to wash “the school germs” off their hands. While A.R. was washing, she told her mother that Tell Cadotte, A.R.’s thirty-year-old half-brother, “was weird.” She explained that Cadotte “would do weird things” to her whenever he babysat. In explaining to her mother what “weird things” Cadotte had done, A.R. disclosed details of sexual abuse that spanned two years. [¶3.] That same evening, A.R. accompanied her parents to the Public Safety Building to report the abuse to the police. Two days later, A.R. sat for a forensic interview with a trained forensic interviewer at the Child Advocacy Center. During this interview, A.R. drew four sexually explicit pictures, two of which depicted sex acts that Cadotte made her perform. She also referred to having seen a video of these sexual acts on Cadotte’s cell phone. [¶4.] Based on the information A.R. disclosed during her forensic interview, Detective Seth Walker with the Rapid City Police Department sought and received a warrant to search Cadotte’s residence for electronic devices that could contain

child pornography. Though home when the officers arrived to execute the warrant, Cadotte did not respond to the officers’ knock-and-announce efforts. The officers ultimately forced entry into Cadotte’s home, where they found him in the basement and in close proximity to two laptop computers that were running encryption software and a program called “Eraser,” which shreds electronic files. [¶5.] In addition to the two laptops, officers seized ten other electronic devices, including phones and flash drives. These devices were turned over to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force for forensic examination. Despite the efforts to encrypt or erase electronic data, the ICAC examiner recovered more than 300 photos and/or videos depicting child pornography from the laptops. The remaining electronic devices were either too broken to examine or were fully encrypted, or they did not contain contraband images. [¶6.] Detective Walker later met with the ICAC examiner to review the recovered photos. Of all the images reviewed, forty-one of them were identified as depicting the same child victim. Several of these photos showed a young female child performing fellatio on an adult man. In each photo the child’s eyes were covered using a hat, sleep mask, blindfold, or a piece of fabric. The photos were taken from a side profile near the male’s waist, so none of the images exposed the male subject’s face. In some of the photos, however, Detective Walker recognized a distinctive “white belt with plaid designs.” The belt stood out to Detective Walker because, in his words, “it was the same belt that [he] saw hanging in Tell Cadotte’s closet” depicted in one of the photographs taken during the search warrant execution.

[¶7.] Detective Walker met with Tina and showed her sanitized copies of the photos depicting the single child victim “to try and get a positive identification on the young female in the photos and to attempt to locate any other evidence to corroborate where and who may have taken those photos.”1 Detective Walker’s report of the interview indicates that Tina “reviewed all of the images and found 23 different pictures involving [A.R.], [A.R.’s] clothing, or household items that belonged to her family . . . .” The report also identifies specific items that Tina recognized, including “a white and blue night gown, pink fuzzy pillow, sleep masks, Peppa Pig hat, black/white blanket, yellow shirt, Hello Kitty blanket, pink pajamas with black sleeves, and a gold mirror.” [¶8.] A couple days after Detective Walker’s meeting with Tina, the circuit court authorized a second search warrant for Cadotte’s residence; this time to search for the belt and other items in the sanitized photographs that Tina had recognized. Officers were unable to locate and collect the white plaid belt, but they did collect other items that appeared in some of the photos, such as blankets, leopard print towels, sleep masks, and a hat. [¶9.] That same day, Cadotte was arrested pursuant to a complaint that alleged first-degree rape, among other charges. On March 17, 2021, a Pennington County grand jury returned a thirteen-count indictment charging Cadotte with twelve counts of first-degree rape in violation of SDCL 22-22-1(1) and one count of sexual contact with a child under the age of sixteen in violation of SDCL 22-22-7.

1. At trial, the State described a sanitized photograph as a picture that contains child pornography, but the sexually explicit content has been blacked out.

[¶10.] Each of the rape counts contained identical allegations of sexual penetration upon A.R. “on or between the 1st day of September, 2016, through the 31st of August 2020, inclusive[.]” The sexual contact count alleged an act of sexual contact with A.R. “on or about the 26th day of January, 2021,” and related to an allegation that Cadotte forced her to masturbate him while he was driving her to her grandfather’s house. [¶11.] Cadotte pled not guilty, and the case remained pending for four years, largely due to a related federal prosecution arising from the contraband images found on his laptop computers. Cadotte eventually pled guilty to possessing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(2)(A), and a federal district court judge sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment, all prior to the state court rape trial, which began in March 2025. [¶12.] Before beginning testimony, defense counsel asked the circuit court to make a record of what it claimed was undisclosed evidence.2 Once on the record, defense counsel explained that upon entering the courtroom that morning, she learned of a binder containing approximately seventy sanitized images that were not provided to her earlier. Because the State intended “to ask a witness about several” of those images, she believed the State “had a responsibility to provide [them] to [her] and did not.” This was an apparent reference to the sanitized photographs Detective Walker had shown Tina in an effort to identify A.R. [¶13.] Defense counsel acknowledged that she had access to and in fact viewed the unsanitized versions of the photographs at the ICAC facility, but she

2. Counsel on appeal is different from Cadotte’s attorney at trial.

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