Ohio

Case Update – Appellate Edition

Posted on January 08, 2013
Time to take a look at the significant appellate decisions handed down in the past month. The 2nd District tackles the issue of destruction of evidence in State v. Beavers.  The defendant had filed a motion to preserve a videotape, but the tape was destroyed...

Case Update – Supreme Court edition

Posted on January 07, 2013
I haven’t done a case update in a month. Usually, I’ll deal with US and Ohio Supreme Court decisions, and then some pertinent Ohio appellate cases.  My BFF Lexis, though, informs me that there are about 300+ of the latter to wade through, an Herculean task akin to cleaning the Augean stables, which probably is [...

An “ordinary” death

Posted on January 04, 2013
Susan Yates had a hard life, and she died bad.  She was homeless when Philip Jones met her in early 2007.  A couple months later, a jogger found her body lying on a path in a cemetery.  She?d been raped and strangled.  A month ago, in State v. Jones, the Supreme Court affirmed Jones? conviction [...

Let’s Make a Deal, Part 2

Posted on January 03, 2013
Yesterday we talked about a situation where you work out a plea for your client, only to have the prosecutor yank it on the day of the plea hearing.  Here?s another variation on that theme: Your client was initially charged with child rape and kidnapping, but the prosecutor has some serious problems with the case, [...

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Let’s Make a Deal, Part 1

Posted on January 02, 2013
You’ve worked your butt off to get a plea deal.  As usual, that means you’ve spent as much time, if not more, negotiating with your client as you have with the prosecutor, managing his expectations, explaining his options, guiding him toward the realization that those options are either doing some time in prison, or doing a [...

A little bit of this and that

Posted on December 28, 2012
I’ll be doing my next Case Update on January 7th, and What’s Up in the 8th the day after, so that will get me back in my regular routine with those two.  In the meantime, today we’ll talk about a few decisions I’ve come across in the past few weeks which are of some consequence...

“Mandatory” probation”

Posted on December 27, 2012
One of the biggest changes in sentencing wrought by HB 86 was the reinstatement of the requirement that judges make findings before imposing consecutive sentences.  That’s resulted in a flurry of appellate decisions, many of them contradictory, as we discussed a few weeks back (here and here)...

An encomium to the 4th Amendment

Posted on December 26, 2012
Quick quiz time.  Name the author of the following quotes on search and seizure law: “The exclusionary rule and the concomitant suppression of evidence generate substantial social costs in permitting the guilty to go free and the dangerous to remain at large...

404(B) after Williams

Posted on December 21, 2012
Of all the various types of evidence that can be used against a defendant, there’s none more deadly than EvidR 404(B), which allows the State to introduce evidence of prior “bad acts” of a defendant in certain circumstances.  It’s bad enough when you’ve got a client on trial for, say, robbery, and the State introduces evidence [...

Three on sex offenses

Posted on December 20, 2012
The transition from Megan’s Law to the Adam Walsh Act was supposed to be a smooth one.  Megan’s Law imposed certain requirements upon sex offenders, and the AWA made those stiffer.  Under Megan’s Law, for example, if an offender failed to notify the sheriff that he’d changed his address, that was a fifth degree felony...

What Williams decided — and didn’t

Posted on December 19, 2012
Two weeks ago, in State v. Williams, the Ohio Supreme Court tackled the issue of allied offenses for the first time since its landmark decision two years ago in State v. Johnson (discussed here).   Johnson jettisoned test employed by State v. Rance, where the elements of the two offenses had to be compared in [...

Public Service Announcement

Posted on December 18, 2012
I know, my grand reopening is tomorrow, but one of my peeps, Bret Crow, is Public Information Officer for the Supreme Court, and he sent me an email this morning.  Seems that effective the 1st of the coming year, the new Supreme Court Rules of Practice goes into effect...

Back ashore

Posted on December 16, 2012
Well, I’m back from my cruise, the main lesson learned being that I’m not a cruise-type guy, although at least things went better for me than for the passengers of the ship at left.  A shout-out to Donovan, the taxi driver in Jamaica, whom we engaged to drive us to “the beach,” and who interpreted this to [...

Buried treasure

Posted on December 05, 2012
I wasn’t terribly enthused about the 8th District’s decision in State v. Hood, deeming it worthy of only half a paragraph in my weekly summary of the 8th’s decisions when it was handed down.  The key issue in the case was testimony by a detective linking Hood to  a murder, based on the detective’s determination [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on December 04, 2012
A while back, I had a murder case which pled down to a manslaughter, and at the sentencing, I was non-plussed to see numerous family members of the victim troop to the podium to recount the wondrous pleasures bestowed by the recently deceased upon all those who knew him...

Case Update

Posted on December 03, 2012
The big news out of SCOTUS was no news:  in its conference on Friday, the Court took no action on the ten same-sex marriage cases it now has on its docket.   There is no question that the Court will take up some of the cases, and while it might fritter around the edges ? deciding, [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on November 30, 2012
Crime and the election results.  Tyone Miles got bad advice from his lawyer.  Back in 2005, Miles was charged with burglary and with cashing some fictitious checks at a California gas station, in an amount around $500, and was offered a plea bargain which would have involved doing six years in prison...

HB 86 and consecutive sentencing – Part II

Posted on November 29, 2012
Yesterday, we talked about what the law on consecutive sentencing is.  Today, I’ll discuss where we might want to take it.  I’m starting with two presumptions: Sentencing is the most important function of the criminal justice system Whether to run sentences consecutively is the most important decision in the sentencing process The first presumption is indisuptable...

HB 86 and consecutive sentencing – Part I

Posted on November 28, 2012
HB 86, effective last September, provided the most sweeping sentencing reforms since SB 2 back in 1996.  We’ve now had a little over a year for cases on the new law to percolate through the appellate process, and with one exception, there’s not much activity...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 27, 2012
Last week?s spate of criminal decisions from the 8th provide support for my theory that some people make very bad decisions in life, and criminal defendants comprise a grossly disproportionate segment of that subset of the population.  We also learn that while every other person in Cleveland seems to have a gun, to the great [...

Case Update

Posted on November 26, 2012
Last week I told you about several cert applications SCOTUS had on tap, one concerning whether the availabity of the insanity defense was constitutionally required (four states don’t allow it) and another on nonunanimous jury verdicts in felony cases (two states do allow it)...

Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 21, 2012
It’s a tough economy, and a lot of people would jump at a job opportunity like the one offered in this advertisement: ? Start Date: Next 1-2 weeks ? Duration: expected 4-5 months ? Pay Rate: $29/hour ? Schedule: 40 hours per week, 5 Days per week But a lot of people wouldn’t meet the [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 20, 2012
Last year, the 8th District handed down 1246 decisions, or about 104 a month.  They?re well off that pace this year; with a little over a month to go, they?ve issued 323 fewer, and last year they only ruled on 117 cases after Thanksgiving.  Last week they issued only nine, less than half their normal [...

Case Update

Posted on November 19, 2012
SCOTUS has come down with its first opinion of the term, holding in United States v. Bormes that the Little Tucker Act does not waive the government?s sovereign immunity with respect to damages actions under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  If you read the opinion, or summaries of it (which is as far as I [...

In search of bright lines

Posted on November 16, 2012
As the comics say, timing is everything.  George Summers didn?t have it; he happened to walk out of his house just as the police were about to enter it pursuant to a search warrant.  They detained him while they searched the property, and after finding drugs in the basement and determining that he owned the [...

On the road

Posted on November 15, 2012
I’m heading down to Columbus today for the death penalty seminar.  Not that I’m attending it; I’m giving a presentation tomorrow on how Padilla, Missouri v. Frye, and Lafler v. Cooper have changed the way we represent clients.  We’ll talk about that more later on, but it got me to thinking of things I’ve learned from [...

Knock knock, who’s there?

Posted on November 14, 2012
The cops get a tip that the guy in Unit 102 of the housing project is dealing drugs.  It could be an anonymous tip, or just some gossip they heard, certainly not enough to get a warrant.  No matter.  A bunch of them go over to the unit and knock on the door...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 13, 2012
One judge has a simple policy:  no pleas on the day of trial.  Sure, it?s often counterproductive.  Some defendants simply won?t plead until they see there?s no alternative:  they think the witnesses aren?t going to show up, or some other deus ex machina is going to rescue them from their inexorable fate...

Case Update

Posted on November 12, 2012
No decisions from the US Supreme Court yet, but the gang at SCOTUSblog tells us they anticipate one this week.  There are some oral arguments I?ve missed, and we?ll try to tackle some of them this week.  On Wednesday we?ll discuss Chaidez v. US, the case concerning the retroactivity of Padilla v...

DNA: The new frontier

Posted on November 09, 2012
It would probably come as no surprise to Dajuan Emerson, at least not any more, that the United States maintains the largest DNA database in the world, containing about 5 million samples.  Emerson was charged with rape back in 2005, but beat that rap...

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