Ohio

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on March 09, 2010
After my jeremiad last week about forests being felled so that the 8th District judges can write opinions regurgitating in unneeded detail the law on manifest weight and insufficiency, four decisions on the subject this week, and in every one the law is summed up in a tidy paragraph...

Case Update

Posted on March 08, 2010
We start our runup to Spring Break — I’ll be on vacation next week, filming more of those “Girls Gone Wild” videos I use to supplement the meager income from my law practice — with a paucity of news from DC; the only decision of note (to me, at least), was Johnson v...

Friday Roundup

Posted on March 05, 2010
Once upon a time.  Travis had done all the right things, and he said all the right things.  I’d done my part, for sure.  Travis, who’d been down to the joint a couple times in the early part of the decade, had stayed out of trouble since then, until one night he came home and [...

Guns, guns, guns

Posted on March 04, 2010
Sometimes oral argument gives you no clue as to how an appellate court is going to rule on a case.  Sometimes it does.  The oral argument before the US Supreme Court on Tuesday in McDonald v. City of Chicago is definitely of the latter variety. McDonald was the natural consequence of the Court’s decision two years [...

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Solving Miranda

Posted on March 03, 2010
Of all the Warren Court decisions expanding the rights of the accused, none earned more enmity over the years than Miranda v. Arizona, the 1966 ruling which required police to give a four-part warning to suspects before interrogation.  Prosecutors, police, and conservative commentators predicted that the decision would be devastating to law enforcement, given that about [...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on March 02, 2010
The court gets back on track with another pro-defendant search decision, and comes up with several good opinions.  And Your Faithful Correspondent comes up with a good idea for the environment. The police officers in State v. Burks had certainly done their homework:  they’d set up a buy-bust operation near E...

Case Update

Posted on March 01, 2010
Twin rulings on Miranda were the flavor of the week down in DC:  in Maryland v. Schatzer, the Court announced a new rule as to when police could resume interrogation of a suspect after he’d invoked his Miranda rights, and in Florida v. Powell, the Court upheld a version of the Miranda warnings which didn’t [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on February 26, 2010
An entendre, bartender, and make it a double.  Only in Texas:  in 1990, Charles Dean Hood was sentenced to death for killing his boss and the boss’s girlfriend.  There wasn’t much doubt of his guilt; his fingerprints were found not only on the garbage bags that covered the dead woman’s body, but on the note he [...

A new look at innocence claims

Posted on February 25, 2010
Greg Taylor was convicted in 1993 of murdering Jacquetta Thomas in Raleigh, North Carolina.  After spending 17 years in prison, he was freed last week when the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission determined that he had been wrongfully convicted...

The pitfalls of stop-and-frisk analysis

Posted on February 24, 2010
Of the various exceptions to the 4th Amendment’s warrant requirement, there’s probably none more frequently used, and certainly none more frequently litigated, than the “stop and frisk” doctrine created 42 years ago in Terry v...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on February 23, 2010
The court tackles the question of when informants have to be disclosed, what the appropriate sanctions are for failure to provide discovery, and tops off the week by turning back the 4th Amendment clock. Art McKoy, a black activist here in Cleveland, is a figure of some notoriety...

Case Update

Posted on February 22, 2010
Reaction to the decision in Citizens United allowing corporate campaign financing still dominates news about the US Supreme Court; a recent poll showed 80% of the public opposed to the decision.  Interestingly, the opposition crosses party lines (85% of Democrats and 76% of Republicans disapprove), perhaps complicating Republican congressional leaders’ vow to oppose any legislation limiting its [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on February 19, 2010
Ghostbusters.  So, this is how my mind works.  The other evening I’m watching, for no particularly good reason, an old episode of Two and a Half Men, the CBS comedy starring Charlie Sheen.  In this episode, Charlie’s mother, a real estate agent, bemoans the troubles she’s having selling a Malibu beachhouse whose owner just committed suicide...

Jury Nullification

Posted on February 18, 2010
“Can you set aside your own personal feelings about what the law should be, and apply the law as I give it to you?” the judge will ask. “Yes,” the jurors will say.  Sometimes with their fingers crossed… The concept of jury nullification has deep roots; it was probably the reason that one of the famous trials [...

Pleas and conflicts

Posted on February 17, 2010
Of all the mistakes a lawyer can make, representing two criminal defendants in the same case is one of the biggest.  Of all the mistakes a trial judge can make, getting too involved in plea negotiations is one of the biggest.  Both were on display in last week’s 8th District decision in State v...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on February 16, 2010
This week’s decisions from the 8th District give lessons on post-release control, 404(B) evidence, and what not to do in plea discussions, and feature a cast of characters — Apache Hightower, Ebay Fuller, and Taiwan Wiggins – that would feel at home in an Elmore Leonard novel...

Case Update

Posted on February 15, 2010
SCOTUS comes back into session next week, and with the dismissal of Briscoe v. Virginia, the only big criminal cases remaining on the Court’s docket are the two on life without parole for juveniles, discussed here, and discrepancies in the Miranda warning, discussed here...

Friday Roundup

Posted on February 12, 2010
Technology meets the law.  I, and just about everybody else in the world, have commented on the new term which has entered the legal lexicon:  the “Google mistrial,” which results when a member of the jury does legal research online or sends a text message about the case to someone else...

The Supreme Court takes a look at Ice

Posted on February 11, 2010
Four years ago in State v. Foster, the Ohio Supreme Court held that the provisions of Ohio’s sentencing laws which required a trial judge to make findings of fact before imposing consecutive sentences violated the US Supreme Court’s holdings in Apprendi v...

A duty to disclose

Posted on February 10, 2010
It’s not often that a decision on attorney discipline has a major impact on how law is practiced.  It may well have happened with last week’s decision in Disciplinary Counsel v. Kellogg-Martin.  The case stemmed from Kellogg-Martin’s actions in prosecuting a child rape case in 2002...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on February 09, 2010
The Dykas case finally comes to an end, an appellate argument on sentencing comes a cropper, and we learn valuable lessons about no contest pleas.  All that, and a sidenote on the intricacies of insufficient evidence claims and affirmative defenses, represent the court’s body of work for the week...

Case Update

Posted on February 08, 2010
What’s that stuff about the wheels of justice grinding slowly?  Don’t tell that to Mark Brown.  Well, actually you couldn’t if you wanted to:  he’s dead.  He’d been on Ohio’s death row since he was convicted of killing a Youngstown store owner and a clerk back in 1994, while apparently trying to copy a scene [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on February 05, 2010
Mo’ money, mo’ money.  The  US Supreme Court’s decision a couple of weeks back in Citizens United v. FEC,  which allowed corporations (and unions) to make unlimited expenditures on behalf of candidates, got approval this week from an unlikely quarter:  Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Moyer...

A new look at 12(B)(6)?

Posted on February 04, 2010
One of the major differences between criminal and civil cases is that the latter afford several opportunities for trial avoidance.  No matter how overwhelming the defendant’s guilt, or how weak the state’s evidence, the only way to determine the result is to put twelve people in the box and let them sort it all out...

What does Williams mean?

Posted on February 03, 2010
On Thursday I wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision last week in State v. Williams, bemoaning the fact that while the court had agreed that felonious assault and attempted murder were allied offenses, it bought into the idea that Williams could be convicted of two separate counts of attempted murder because he’d fired two shots at the [...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on February 02, 2010
Criminal defendants enjoy the best week of the new year, with three reversals.  The court dishes out a bevy of civil decisions, too, the moral of which is that in today’s economy, it’s best to do whatever you can to hold onto your job. A few weeks back I discussed State v...

Case Update

Posted on February 01, 2010
Not with a bang but a whimper:  after all the talk about the Supreme Court’s using Briscoe v. Virginia to take another look at Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, and possibly overrule it (see my posts here and here), last week the Court issues a per curiam decision vacating the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision in Briscoe and [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on January 29, 2010
My dream come true:  more ways to look up cases.  Or rather, new ways.  In the face of declining revenues growth — 1% to 2% a year, as opposed to 5% to 7% a year in the past — Lexis and Westlaw have decided to give their programs a major facelift...

Allied offenses: once more, into the breach

Posted on January 28, 2010
As the countless legions of regular readers of this blog can contest, I take second place to no one in lambasting the current state of Ohio’s allied offense law.  Well, maybe second place to one person:  Ohio Supreme Court Justice Judith Lanzinger...

First look at the Castle Doctrine

Posted on January 27, 2010
In September of 2008, Ohio’s New, Improved Castle Doctrine went into effect.  This wasn’t the one  from Merry Old Englande, which held that the duty to retreat in self-defense cases did not apply if the defendant was in his own home.  The new statute, RC 2901...

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