Ohio

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on January 26, 2010
No search cases, the court addresses the Castle Doctrine, which we’ll discuss tomorrow; the rest is relatively ho-hum.  We’ll take a look anyway, ’cause that’s why you pay me the big bucks. I read somewhere that, since the passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, the rate of success in Federal habeas [...

Case Update

Posted on January 25, 2010
As you might gather, I read a lot of cases.  I do not read cases which are 183 pages long and begin, KENNEDY, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SCALIA and ALITO, JJ., joined, in which THOMAS, J., joined as to all but Part IV, and in which STEVENS, [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on January 22, 2010
Consistency in sentencing.  Everybody agrees that it’s a bad thing if two defendants charged with the same crimes and with similar backgrounds wind up with wildly disparate sentences.  Preventing that was the whole idea behind the enactment of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines back in 1984, where the various characteristics of the defendant and the crime [...

Only following orders

Posted on January 21, 2010
Back in 2007, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Dan Gaul believed that a defendant in a felonious assault case was behind the victim’s disappearance just before trial.  He stopped jury selection, declared a mistrial, and removed himself from the case, after making a statement to the media and declaring his suspicions about the defendant [...

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Apologies

Posted on January 20, 2010
Reading the presentence report got my hopes up.  Finding out that one of the victims had shown up for the sentencing got them back down again. I?d been assigned to represent Latanya back in July.  She and another guy had swiped an employee?s purse from under a cash register at a store in the mall...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on January 19, 2010
In the last three weeks before this past one, the 8th handed down only thirteen decisions.  They make up for that with a vengeance by doubling their output last week.  Fifteen criminal decisions find their way onto that list, but defendants get no love, managing merely to eke out a remand for resentencing in a [...

Case Update

Posted on January 18, 2010
The only significant decision out of Washington last week was Smith v. Spisak, which I discussed on Friday.  Some decisions are expected on Wednesday, the most eagerly anticipated of which is the one on campaign finance reform, which you probably won’t read about here...

Friday Roundup

Posted on January 15, 2010
And Phillip Morris says smoking is good for you.  A month ago I mentioned complaints about the increasing use of Tasers by law enforcement personnel, which has allegedly led to a number of deaths.  I labeled the item “March of Technology,” and in a true indication of how technologies overlap, you can find the 20 Top Taser [...

Adventures in 4th Amendment law

Posted on January 14, 2010
I finally figured out how to win the case on the way in to work the morning of the hearing. My client Antwan’s tale of woe was simple.  Cops investigating a stolen motorcyle case had gotten a tip that the bike could be found in the yard of the Antwan’s house, where he lived with a couple [...

Melendez-Diaz revisited

Posted on January 13, 2010
Last June, the Supreme Court ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (discussed here) that results of laboratory tests were testimonial evidence under Crawford, and thus the person who performed those tests had to be subject to cross-examination at trial...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on January 12, 2010
8th District, eight cases — that was the court’s output this past week.  So instead of quantity, we’ll go with quality, and take an extended look at one of them. State v. Thomas is Exhibit No. 84 in support of my contention that the 8th is the most 4th Amendment-friendly court in the state...

Case Update

Posted on January 11, 2010
The Ohio Seven issues a trio of significant cases, two on allied offenses.  State v. Underwood involves the additional issue of a defendant’s right to appeal a sentence.  Underwood had pled no contest to four counts of theft with an agreed sentence of two years, but argued on appeal that the two counts should have merged...

Friday Roundup

Posted on January 08, 2010
News from the dark side.  Maricopa County is the fourth largest county in the country.  And, at least as far as the judicial system is concerned, things have pretty much gone to hell there.  A couple months ago, I showed a video of a deputy sheriff rifling through an attorney’s file during a hearing...

Let’s go to the video

Posted on January 07, 2010
‘Tis no longer the season, and some decisions are starting to trickle out of the Ohio Supreme Court; there were two on Tuesday, which I’ll talk about next week.  Today, we’ll take a look at some recent oral arguments and see what might be happening down the road...

2 + 3 + 2 = 4… or 5… whatever

Posted on January 06, 2010
According to Lexis, last year there were 362 Ohio decisions in which the phrase “post-release controls” appeared.  There are cases dealing with exactly what a judge has to say about it on a plea, at sentencing, what happens if the judge doesn’t say that, and how it can be rectified...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on January 05, 2010
If you’re a family member of an 8th District judge and didn’t get much for Christmas, don’t buy the excuse “but I was too busy working to shop”; the court handed down a paltry five decisions in the past two weeks.  It might have been simple exhaustion, however; the 8th handed down 1,043 opinions last [...

Case Update

Posted on January 04, 2010
As you can see, my New Years resolution to start exercising regularly is already paying big dividends.  I took time out from the gym to wade through the decisions that have come down since my last Case Update.  Nothing from the US Supreme Court; they’re gearing up for the oral argument next Monday in Briscoe [...

Jeopardy Question: Ho, ho, ho

Posted on December 21, 2009
  Answer:  What does Tiger Woods want for Christmas? Here’s a picture from my day job, when I’m not writing the blog.  Seriously, thanks to everybody who’s stopped by over the past year.  I hope you have a good holiday, and I’ll see you back here on January 4th.

Friday Roundup

Posted on December 18, 2009
Holiday schedule.  This is my last post for the year; I’ll be back on January 4 with a rundown of all the major developments in the law over the next two weeks.  Which is to say, none.  The French shut down the country in August so that everybody can go on vacation; we do pretty [...

Privacy and modern technology

Posted on December 17, 2009
Interesting week for Blackberry users.  On Monday the US Supreme Court granted cert in a case on the question of whether a police department violated an employee’s constitutional rights by inspecting personal text messages he sent on a government pager...

Prosecutors gone wild

Posted on December 16, 2009
About the only thing more dangerous in criminal law than an imaginative prosecutor is a lazy Congress. In 1987, the Supreme Court dealt with a case involving a law dating back to 1872, making it a crime to use the mails to carry out a fraud.  A Kentucky official, James Gray, and a private individual, Charles [...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on December 15, 2009
Although there are only a handful of cases dismissed each year for speedy trial violations, few things so occupy the minds of judges as the possibility of such an event befalling them.  The suggestion that all publicity is good publicity is of little comfort to the judge who goes out to fetch his morning paper [...

Case Update

Posted on December 14, 2009
Eric and Kathleen get a divorce on June 19, 2007.  There’s a pension which has to be divided, and so the court decree orders Kathleen to submit a Qualified Domestic Relations Order doing that.  Eric wants to appeal, but up to that time most people thought the law was that you couldn’t appeal until the [...

Friday roundup

Posted on December 11, 2009
Get me to the court on time.  Must be something in the water.  Last week I regaled you with the story of Shawn, for whom I had worked out a fairly sweet deal, only to have him be a no-show on the day of trial.  Two days later the bailiff called and told me he [...

The elephant in the corner

Posted on December 10, 2009
In June of 2002, Kerry Perez tried to rob a drive-through liquor store in Dayton.  (Is it just me, or did you do a double-take at the term “drive-through liquor store”?  But I digress…)  Things didn’t go well; the owner put up a fight, resulting in a gun battle in which Perez’s accomplice was the only casualty...

What does Miranda mean?

Posted on December 09, 2009
You’d think that 43 years after Miranda was handed down, we’d have a very clear idea of what exactly it required police officers to advise a defendant before questioning.  After reading Monday’s oral argument in the Supreme Court on Florida v...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on December 08, 2009
As you might have guessed, I read a lot of cases for this blog.  Reading cases is just like any other skill:  the more you use it, the better you get at it.  One of the things I’ve learned is to skim the opinion for the assignments of error.  If they’re manifest weight and insufficiency arguments, [...

Case Update

Posted on December 07, 2009
Still no decisions from the Supremes in DC, although that’s supposed to change shortly:  they’ve promised to have some on Monday, and, if it’s anything I find interesting, I’ll have something on it here later this week. Down in Columbus, the Supreme Court affirmed a death penalty in State v...

Friday Roundup

Posted on December 04, 2009
Rich oxen getting gored.  Sentencing Law & Policy points us to a recent NY Times article, which begins: In the next several months, the Supreme Court will decide at least a half-dozen cases about the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption...

Death and Mitigation

Posted on December 03, 2009
Robert van Hook and George Porter committed the same crime, aggravated murder, albeit under substantially different circumstances:  van Hook went to a gay bar to rob a  homosexual, went home with one, and killed him, while Porter killed his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend...

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