Ohio

Case Update

Posted on December 01, 2008
As might be expected, the Supreme Court Nine found it more fitting to engage in the traditional holiday gluttony than to provide me with cases to write about.  The cholesterol-laden Court will have oral argument this week in the Phillip Morris case out of Oregon (previous discussions on this blog here)...

Open Discovery: The Jig’s Up

Posted on November 26, 2008
Several months ago, I got a call from a producer at a local radio station.  They’d seen stuff in the paper about open discovery in criminal cases, and she’d come across my blog, and she thought I might be able to explain some elementary aspects of the subject and answer some questions she had...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 25, 2008
Not a good week for women in Cuyahoga County; the five criminal cases on appeal involved two domestic violence convictions, and one where the defendant had killed a rape victim.  Not a good week for defendants, either; after last week’s shutout — criminal defendants went 0 for 8 — we finally get a reversal in [...

Case Update

Posted on November 24, 2008
It would be a lot easier for me to write about cases if there were cases to write about.  The Ohio Supreme Court hasn’t handed down an opinion on a non-election-related case since October 23.  The big news out of the US Supreme Court was SCOTUSblog’s eye-glazing account of how the Court had granted an [...

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Friday Roundup

Posted on November 21, 2008
Expanding the Blogroll.  When I started The Briefcase back in May of 2006, it was one of the very few blogs devoted to Ohio law.  Some others have come along since then, and some of those have dropped out.  That’s understandable.  Doing this, as you might guess, can be incredibly time-consuming...

Never mind

Posted on November 20, 2008
Back on October 1, the Plain Dealer’s Regina Brett opened a column with these two paragraphs: Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason could end up opening the door to open discovery in Ohio. I met with him on Monday for nearly an hour and a half on the ninth floor of the Justice Center...

Two looks at the criminal justice system

Posted on November 19, 2008
One step forward, one step back…  Dallas may not be the capital of Texas, but it likely holds the honor of being Ground Zero for wrongful convictions.  Piloted for 36 years by Henry Wade, the prosecutor’s office achieved a stunning 93% trial conviction rate...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 18, 2008
Brutal week for criminal defendants by the lake this week:  just three weeks after batting .333 — eight reversals out of twenty-four cases – they go oh-for-eight.  That mirrors the results statewide:  other than a reversal in a juvenile delinquency case, all of the criminal cases in the state last week resulted in affirmances...

Case Update

Posted on November 17, 2008
Nothing out of the US Supreme Court this past week, except a decision sure to cheese off the Save the Whales Foundation:  in Winter v. National Resources Defense Council, the Court upheld the Navy’s right to conduct sonar excercises in the Pacific, despite claims of environmentalists that such exercises might harm marine life...

Friday roundup

Posted on November 14, 2008
My wisdom confirmed.  Remember all those posts I wrote about how the Supreme Court’s decision this July in DC v. Heller, declaring that the Second Amendment granted an individual right to bear arms, would have a profound effect on gun regulations?  Posts like this one, in which I sagely predicted that “Heller will herald the [...

Discovery Wars

Posted on November 13, 2008
I’ve blogged before about the new proposal on discovery from the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judges.  I highlighted the proposal in this post back in September; basically, it would require the prosecutor to turn over witness statements and police reports, which Head Honcho Bill Mason’s office has jealously guarded over the years...

Lab Reports and Crawford

Posted on November 12, 2008
Four years after Crawford v. Washington revolutionized Confrontation Clause jurisprudence, at least one major issue remains completely unsettled:  the admissibility of lab reports and similar records which have been routinely admitted at trials over the years...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 11, 2008
The defendant in State v. Pate had gotten his 20-year prison sentence the old-fashioned way:  he’d earned it, firing a couple of shots at police officers while running from them, then hijacking a car at gunpoint and leading the police on a car chase...

Case Update

Posted on November 10, 2008
Nothing going on down in Columbus, but now with the elections over, maybe we’ll see some things happening:  the oral argument calendar for the Supreme Court resumes next week.  Speaking of elections, 43 new judges were elected in Ohio last week...

Friday Roundup

Posted on November 07, 2008
Dirty Talk.  As I mentioned earlier this week, the big showdown in the US Supreme Court was Tuesday’s oral argument in FCC v. Fox, the case involving the FCC’s recently-developed policy of punishing “fleeting expletives” in broadcast media...

Guilty pleas on the assembly line

Posted on November 06, 2008
There were two cases on guilty pleas out of the 8th this past week.  While one resulted in the vacating of the plea, a highly unusual result, I confess it was pretty much of a headscratcher. The one which stayed true to form was State v. Bassett, which presented the question of just how far a judge [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on November 05, 2008
Some funky stuff this week.  Last week, I mentioned that there’s a lot of case law from the 8th holding that a frisk for weapons isn’t automatic after a stop; even where drugs are involved, the police have to show that they had a reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed and dangerous...

Case Update

Posted on November 04, 2008
With two of the seven judges out campaigning for re-election, not much going on in Columbus.  Down in Washington, the Supremes heard a case yesterday involving federal pre-emption, specifically, whether FDA approval of a drug bars state court common-law negligence claims...

War stories

Posted on November 03, 2008
I was on the road this weekend, so we’ll do the Case Update tomorrow.  Which won’t take long, because there was absolute diddly out of the Ohio Supreme Court last week.  Instead, I’ll update you on a couple of clients. First up is “Jamie,” the 46-year-old transvestite with 26 prior drug cases...

Friday Roundup

Posted on October 31, 2008
Tune in to next year’s episode of CSI.  I was talking to a prosecutor last week about the new open discovery proposal here, which would require the state to provide the defense with a “discovery packet” within one week of the first pretrial...

Open Discovery: Update

Posted on October 30, 2008
As you know, I’ve been following the recent proposal by the judges of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court to allow “open discovery” in criminal cases.  (Prior posts here, here, and here; you can read the judges proposal here.  Today, the Plain Dealer’s Regina Brett wrote another column on the subject, detailing what happened in a local [...

The elusive search for the bright line

Posted on October 29, 2008
While I’ve been critical of the 8th’s confrontation clause jurisprudence, their 4th Amendment cases have been all one could hope for, and that continued last week with State v. Kaine.  The facts are simple:  The cops had staked out a Walgreen’s parking lot in a “high drug area,” and observed a Ford Explorer pull into [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on October 28, 2008
Twenty-four cases last week, and at least a partial reversal in one-third of them. I’ve chided the 8th before for its mishandling of Crawford and hearsay, but all is forgiven:  in State v. Rufus, the court nails it.  Short version:  Husband and wife get into a fight, wife claims husband started it, policeman says he interviewed [...

Case Update

Posted on October 27, 2008
Just a month ago, I highlighted the Supreme Court’s review of Fletcher v. Univ. Hospitals, in which the 8th District had held that a plaintiff’s failure to attach an affidavit of merit to her medical malpractice complaint should be addressed by a motion for more definite statement, rather than a motion to dismiss...

Friday Roundup

Posted on October 24, 2008
I’ve got one of those Charge of the Light Brigade briefs — onward, onward, into the valley of ”judgment affirmed” – due today, in Federal court no less, so let’s just take a quick spin around the web. The Post-Heller landscape...

Judicial writing

Posted on October 23, 2008
North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a threedollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He?d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood...

Is the justice system racist?

Posted on October 22, 2008
This week’s Plain Dealer dog-bites-man story was that… wait for it… black defendants fare worse in the criminal justice system than white ones.  From the 18,000 drug convictions handed down in the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in 2005, 2006, and 2007, the Pee Dee had come up with 364 cases in 2007 that were roughly similar:  [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on October 21, 2008
There were twelve apostles.  There are twelve judges on the 8th District Court of Appeals.  Coincidence?  I’ll let you decide.  Meantime, let’s see what they did last week. Do they still have shop in high school?  They did when I went there, and Reason #43 why I didn’t like it was on display in the 8th District’s decision in [...

Case Update

Posted on October 20, 2008
The big case out of the US Supreme Court this past week was the decision on the Help America Vote Act.  HAVA requires states to check voter registrations against government databases like drivers license records, and to flag mismatches.  The GOP had sued Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to turn over information about mismatches [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on October 17, 2008
Technological meltdown.  The Luddites might have had a point.  For the last three weeks, there’s been a little icon on my computer, telling me that “new updates are ready to be installed.”  On Tuesday, I check it out, and it’s for Windows Service Pack 3, the latest patch intended to make me secure from hackers [...

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