UnicodeDecodeError, invalid continuation byte

Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with "latin-1" codec?

o = "a test of \xe9 char" #I want this to remain a string as this is what I am receiving
v = o.decode("utf-8")

Which results in:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
     return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte

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