Ohio

Resentencing woes

Posted on August 27, 2008
Resentencing is pretty much a fact of life for judges any more.  There are still cases coming back for Foster resentencings, and then there are all those cases where defendants have to be resentenced because of the failure to properly advise them of post-release controls...

Police emergencies and sovereign immunity

Posted on August 26, 2008
So here’s the situation.  Cop is transporting a prisoner from the Sylvania jail to the Lucas County jail.  Stops at a red light.  Woman coming in the opposite direction makes a left turn, because she has a green arrow for the left turn.  Cop, as noted in appellate court’s opinion, “became confused and proceeded forward [...

Case Update

Posted on August 25, 2008
Perhaps the most interesting decision out of the Supreme Court this past week, Ahmad v. AK Steel Corp., was one it didn’t make.  Eighteen months after the appeal had been filed, fifteen months after the court had accepted it, ten month after the briefs had been completed, and seven months after oral argument, the Court decided [...

friday roundup

Posted on August 22, 2008
I’m offended that you find this offensive.  Christian DeJohn wanted to express his views in his graduate military history courses at Temple University that women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in combat.  He feared, though, that this would run afoul of the university’s policy against sexual harassment, which rather broadly prohibits “expressive, visual, or physical [...

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PRC and the right to counsel

Posted on August 21, 2008
Amjad Dayem had been doing his time on the agg robb case he caught back in 1997, carefully marking each day of his ten-year sentence until his release date, which was August 31, 2007.  Nine days before that, he got served with papers telling him he had to have a resentencing hearing because the judge in his [...

Follow the money

Posted on August 20, 2008
Here’s what I learned in school court today:  When you’re doing a plea, and the prosecutor spells out the offense your client is going to plead to, and the judge says, “You mean that’s a crime?”, it’s a pretty good sign for your client...

The lingering effects of Rance

Posted on August 19, 2008
In July of last year, I highlighted a 1st District case, State v. Hundley, to focus on the absurdities of Ohio’s law on allied offenses as articulated by the Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Rance.  No doubt deeply influenced by my insightful analysis, this past April the Supreme Court clarified Rance in State v...

Case Update

Posted on August 18, 2008
A trio of civil decisions by the Ohio Supreme Court this past week.  In Nadra v. Mbah, the court declared that RC 2305.10’s two-year statute of limitations for personal injuries was the appropriate limitations period for Federal civil rights actions under 42 USC 1983; although the 6th Circuit and most Ohio courts had applied that statute, two districts [...

The tipping point

Posted on August 15, 2008
Tarika Wilson’s killer went free last week.  “Killer” might not be the word a lot of people would use for Joseph Chavalia:  he was the police officer who gunned down Tarika during a drug raid on her house, as she was holding her year-old child...

A roommate for Bubba

Posted on August 14, 2008
One of the young lawyers in our office had her first jury trial last week, and she was asking around for pointers.  We’ve got some excellent criminal lawyers in the office, and she wanted to take advantage of that resource. She figured she might as well ask me, too, so we talked about jury selection...

Guns and searches

Posted on August 13, 2008
Back when the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller came down and declared that individual ownership of a gun was a fundamental constitutional right, I predicted that courts would have to take a second look at the validity of weapons disability and perhaps even firearms specifications statutes...

Employer intentional torts

Posted on August 12, 2008
Back in 1911, Ohio created the system of workers compensation.  It offered a tradeoff:  workers could receive compensation for their injuries without having to prove their employer was negligent; on the other hand, the compensation was less than the tort system would normally provide, and they gave up their right to sue the employer in tort...

Case Update

Posted on August 11, 2008
The gang in Columbus swung back into action last week.  In State v. Jeffries, the Supreme Court held that only a statement made during plea negotiations or discussions is inadmissible under EvidR 410; the defendant’s statement at issue here was made before the plea negotiations commenced, and was submitted when they did begin...

Friday Roundup

Posted on August 08, 2008
Chat time.  By now, it’s a well-established fact that approximately 30% of the people in the AOL teen chat rooms are dirty old men trying to hit on young girls.  The problem, at least for that 30%, is that the other 70% are FBI agents or cops posing as young girls...

Once bitten, twice shy

Posted on August 07, 2008
Back in March, the 8th District decided State v. Casalicchio, which involved the question of whether a sentence imposed without advising a defendant of post-release controls was void, or merely voidable.  Nine months earlier, the Supreme Court had held in State v...

False confessions

Posted on August 06, 2008
The Jon Benet Ramsey case took its latest turn with the news a couple of weeks ago that new DNA tests had exclused the Ramsey family members as suspects in the child’s death.  This, of course, was a case that was supposed to have been solved a couple years back when John Mark Karr confessed to [...

Case Update - Back in the Saddle Edition

Posted on August 05, 2008
The only other Supreme Court decision besides Colon II, which I discussed yesterday, was State v. Clark, which involved the issue of whether a guilty plea was voided by the trial judge’s giving incorrect information about post-release controls:  the judge had told the the defendant, who’d pled to aggravated murder, that he’d have to do five years [...

Reconsidering Colon

Posted on August 04, 2008
I know, it’s the day for the Case Update, but we’ll have to save that for tomorrow.   While I was chillin’, the Ohio Supreme Court took another look at its decision a few months back in State v. Colon, in which it reversed a conviction because neither the indictment nor the jury instructions specified a mens [...

Just chillin’…

Posted on July 31, 2008
  For the next couple of days.  I’ll see you on Monday.

Max Consec

Posted on July 30, 2008
No, that’s not the name of a character in a new Fox series this fall, it’s the new fad among some judges:  handing down maximum, consecutive sentences.  The 8th District’s decision last week’s in State v. Sutton might slow that impulse...

The Feds come calling

Posted on July 29, 2008
Whatever kind of day you had yesterday, it was better than the one Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo had.  Here’s a simple tip:  when FBI and IRS agents show up and your office and your home with U-Hauls and start removing files, it’s not a Good Thing...

Case Update

Posted on July 28, 2008
Summertime, and the blogging is easy…  The Washington Gang is off until October, and the Columbus Seven is apparently in cruise mode:  the most notable decision out of the Ohio Supreme Court this past week was the granting of a motion to set the execution date for Gregory L...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 25, 2008
No ifs, ands, or butts.  As trends go, I much — much — preferred the miniskirt to the saggy pants look, never having developed an appreciation for male underwear, other than my own.  While this would seem to be a matter for the fashion police, the real police are getting involved now, too; as this [...

Change the channel, dude

Posted on July 24, 2008
Just like people of our generation remember where they were the day John Kennedy was shot, and of the generation prior to that remembered where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed, future generations will no doubt remember where they were on September 11, 2001, and on February 1, 2004...

Another look at Kennedy?

Posted on July 23, 2008
In one of the last decisions of this past term, the Supreme Court put the kabosh to a state law allowing the death penalty for child rapists in Louisiana v. Kennedy (discussed here).  On Monday, Louisiana filed a petition with the Court for reconsideration of the case...

The search for hard data

Posted on July 22, 2008
One of the things I’ve harped upon in the past is the lack of empirical data to guide lawyers in making strategic and tactical trial decisions.  If I want to find out what Derek Jeter has hit with men in scoring position and two out over the past three years, it’ll take me about twenty [...

Case Update

Posted on July 21, 2008
Other than affirming a death penalty conviction, the Ohio Supreme Court didn’t do much this past week.  The decision in State v. Hale involved a 2004 killing here in Cleveland, and alleged 22 propositions of law.  None broke new ground, and the Court affirmed the conviction and ordered Hale’s sentence into… um, execution on November [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 18, 2008
Some final observations on the last Supreme Court term.  (Final = for now.)  Diversity.  Linda Greenhouse has been the New York Times Supreme Court reporter for the past 30 years.  She’s an attorney herself, and whenever there was an oral argument or a decision on a major case, her stories on it would be the first [...

Penal Dysfunction?

Posted on July 17, 2008
It’s not the things you don’t know that hurt you, it’s the things you know for sure that just ain’t so. — Anonymous I was surfing the web the other day and came across a post on Prof. Berman’s Sentencing Law & Policy blog, citing another pair of newspaper articles bemoaning the mass incarceration that has [...

Guns in the city

Posted on July 16, 2008
I’ve spent the last week in a kiddy-rape trial, a particularly nasty one (as opposed to the kiddy-rape trials that are loads of fun).  One of the few highlights of the trial was my discovery of a Cleveland detective with the least expansive view of the 4th Amendment I’ve ever seen...

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