Ohio

A pound of flesh

Posted on October 16, 2008
It’s not unusual to have a criminal case where the police officer’s pursuit of the case approaches the level of a vendetta.  I’ve got one now. Short version is that my guy — let’s call him Leon — had some run-ins with the North Olmsted police, and one officer in particular — we’ll call him Ralph — [...

The Supremes take another look at the exclusionary rule

Posted on October 15, 2008
If there’s one thing criminal lawyers, normally a contentious lot, can agree on, it’s that the 4th Amendment has been pretty much eviscerated over the past thirty years.  Decisions like Whren v. US, which upheld car stops even where the reason for the stop was pretextual, US v...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on October 14, 2008
Mostly criminal cases this week… There have been any number of decisions on advising a defendant of post-release control at sentencing, and State v. Sneed is another, with a bit of a twist.  The trial judge had orally advised the defendant of PRC, but forgot to include it in the journal entry...

Case Update

Posted on October 13, 2008
Slim pickings from the Ohio Supreme Court, and only 50 decisions in the courts of appeals.  The big decision from the Ohio Seven was State v. Veney, in which the court affirmed the 10th District’s vacating of a plea because the trial court had failed to inform Veney that the state had to prove his [...

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Sentencing: Clarifying the standard of review

Posted on October 10, 2008
I’m finally redeeming my promise to discuss the two criminal cases that the Ohio Supreme Court decided last week.  Well, at least one of them; I’m going to kick the discussion of the Supreme Court case on the hearsay rule into next week. The opinion in State v...

Another go-around on Rance

Posted on October 09, 2008
There were a couple of decisions from the Supreme Court last week that merit some discussion, and I’d promised you a recap of the oral argument in State v. Winn, the latest case on allied offenses.  We’ll do the latter today, and the former tomorrow...

Open discovery update

Posted on October 08, 2008
I mentioned last week that, despite Bill Mason’s seeming embrace of open discovery in his interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Regina Brett last week, he’d sent the judges a letter backing away from that.  I’ve seen a copy of the letter since then, and frankly, it’s not quite as in-your-face as I’d imagined...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on October 07, 2008
State v. Ennist has some good stuff about speedy trial.  Did you know, for example, that a guilty plea waives your right to claim a violation of your statutory right to speedy trial, but not your constitutional right?  Neither did I.  Didn’t make much difference, as it turns out; proving the constitutinal violation is a [...

Case Update

Posted on October 05, 2008
No shortage of big decisions by the Ohio Supreme Court this week.  In State v. Kalish, the court defines the standard to be used by appellate courts in reviewing sentences; later this week I’ll explain why it doesn’t mean anything.  In State v...

Good people

Posted on October 03, 2008
I’m on the road today.  Actually, I was yesterday, too.  I’m down in Washington, DC, attending the annual dinner for the Southern Center for Human Rights.  It’s an organization that was formed back in 1976, and does prison reform and death penalty defense throughout the South...

Open discovery is coming… maybe

Posted on October 02, 2008
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, like many other newspapers in the country, is facing a decline in readership.  Its answer to that crisis has been to cut back its pages; the front section, containing national and international news, has gone from a customary sixteen pages to eight, and the Metro section has suffered a similar amputation...

The pitfall with Crawford

Posted on October 01, 2008
I’ve commented before that a distressing number of trial and even appellate courts can’t seem to get a handle on Crawford v. Washington, the 2004 Supreme Court decision which banned the use of “testimonial” statements at trial...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on September 30, 2008
I practice in Cuyahoga County.  A fair amount of my readership is here.  The 8th District Court of Appeals hands down more decisions than any other appellate district in the state.  Hence, the new feature here:  Tuesday’s rundown of decisions from the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals...

Case Update

Posted on September 29, 2008
Not much on the Ohio Supreme Court’s agenda this week.  Perhaps the most significant decision was In re Andrew.  Andrew had been adjudicated a delinquent and shipped off to the Department of Youth Services.  At age 17, he was cited as a parole violator, but the hearing didn’t take place until after he’d turned 18...

Friday Roundup

Posted on September 26, 2008
My store of knowledge grows.  What with only having a law degree and 33 years of practice, it’s a damn good thing I have clients who can be counted on to tell me what the law is.  Earlier this week, I had a pretrial for one client charged with drug possession, and learned from him [...

Upcoming Supreme Court arguments

Posted on September 25, 2008
‘Tis the season… for oral arguments, anyway.  The US Supreme Court calendar gets under way on October 6, but today we’ll look at the lineup of Ohio Supreme Court cases which are scheduled for argument next Tuesday and Wednesday. Fletcher v...

Home Rule

Posted on September 24, 2008
If sovereign immunity is the Rubik’s Cube of Ohio law, home rule isn’t far behind.  Ohio’s concept of home rule is a legal doctrine that only a bar examiner could love:   it requires a three-step analysis, the second step of which involves a four-part test...

Case Update - Appellate Edition

Posted on September 23, 2008
In criminal cases, the 6th District looks at the applicability of State v. Colon (I and II, discussed here), and essentially decides that the failure of an indictment to include a mens rea requirement is not a structural error if the defendant pleads guilty...

Case Update - Supreme Court Edition

Posted on September 22, 2008
Guess that’ll teach me to keep my mouth shut.  After bemoaning the lack of Ohio Supreme Court decisions for the past month or so, I sit down to do the weekly case update and find no fewer than seventeen of the little suckers.  We’ll take a look at those today, and then do the courts of [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on September 19, 2008
It’s 11:00 AM.  Do you know where your kids are at?  I got on the 8th District’s case yesterday for some decisions on allied offenses, but one they got indisputably right was Maple Heights v. Ephraim.  Thelma Ephraim’s 17-year-old son did various bad things one particular night, including fleeing from the police, resisting the attempts [...

Allied offenses update

Posted on September 18, 2008
Further evidence was offered in the past few weeks that the 8th District is having an awful time deciding how allied offenses work.  In fact, one could make a pretty good argument that in the last month, they’ve yet to get a case right on this issue...

Open discovery — the ante is raised

Posted on September 17, 2008
As my legions of faithful readers know, this blog is somewhat Cuyahoga-centric:  I practice in Cleveland, so I’m naturally going to devote more attention to what goes on in the courts here, especially the 8th District Court of Appeals.  While I was traipsing through the woods of central Ohio last week on my vacation, hunting [...

Ventures on the “dark side”

Posted on September 16, 2008
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be defense experts in child pornography cases… Dean Boland parlayed a law degree and being a whizz with computers into a nice gig at the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office, that combo landing him a place at the trial table of the biggest civil case in the county’s history:  [...

Case Update - Pioneer Edition

Posted on September 15, 2008
I spent the last week getting away from it all by living in a log cabin, which has the added benefit of allowing me to pass it off as my boyhood home in an effort to gain street cred for my forthcoming run for the presidency.  As you can see, I wasn’t exactly roughing it, but [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on September 05, 2008
News articles I never finished reading.  As Elton John once sang, “All the science, I don’t understand…”  I found this story somewhat reassuring: Hurray for the European Court of Human Rights. It has rejected an emergency injunction to block the Large Hadron Collider from turning on on 10 September...

Crime and politics

Posted on September 04, 2008
In keeping with the spirit of the season, I thought I’d pay tribute to one of the the most prominent figures of the 1988 presidential election.  The gentlemen on your left is William R. Horton.  Back in 1974, he and a couple of other guys robbed a gas station...

Fighting the fight

Posted on September 03, 2008
Malik Wilkinson got convicted of escape and received a four-year sentence.  He appealed, and his lawyer filed an Anders brief, saying there were no meritorious assignments of error.  Wilkinson filed his own pro se brief, and last week, the 2nd District reversed his conviction...

Case Update

Posted on September 02, 2008
The Magnificent Seven in Columbus have apparently been so busy decorating their Labor Day trees and doing last-minute holiday gift shopping that they haven’t had time to write any opinions this past week.  Somehow, I don’t see a surge of activity coming this next week, either...

Friday Roundup

Posted on August 29, 2008
Ungrateful bastard.  I felt kinda bad for the comments I made yesterday about how Cuyahoga County has raised the assigned counsel fees back to what they were in 1978.  After all, at least for the low-level felonies, it works out to a 25% raise from what they were after they got cut back in 2002...

My cup runneth over

Posted on August 28, 2008
They didn’t show this on LA Law. It’s not easy to practice law here in Cuyahoga County. This morning I walked over to my my 9:00 criminal cases at about 9:15.  I’ve got two pretrials and a hearing on a motion to suppress.  No, I’m not a guy who’s usually late...

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