Ohio

Punting on punitive damages

Posted on July 15, 2008
The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Barnes v. University Hosp. dealt with two widely disparate subjects, at least one of which will probably not matter to the great majority of the people in this state.  It does provide an interesting look at how the court works, though, and how it deals with certain issues...

Case Update

Posted on July 14, 2008
Lots of cases from Columbus this week, perhaps the biggest being Barnes v. University Hospitals of Cleveland, concerning “private” judges and punitive damages.  I’ll have more on that tomorrow.  Hageman v. Southwest Gen. Hospital shows how easy it is for a lawyer to get into trouble...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 11, 2008
Class Actions.  Imagine how you would feel as a parent.  You’ve gone out and bought your 15-year-old son Grand Theft Auto:  San Andreas for his Playstation.  Sure, it’s a violent game, in which he’ll get to kill and maim to his heart’s content...

One more on Boston

Posted on July 10, 2008
Back in October of 2006, I criticized the 8th District for indicating in a decision that State v. Boston, the 1989 Supreme Court decision which prohibits expert testimony on whether a child abuse victim is telling the truth, doesn’t apply where the child testifies at trial...

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Fighting the good fight

Posted on July 09, 2008
I was over in court the other day, entering my third hour of waiting for a plea and sentencing, when the bailiff asked me if I wanted to handle a probation violation hearing.  I hadn’t done one in quite a while, so I asked another lawyer, who was entering his third hour of waiting for [...

Punitive damages

Posted on July 08, 2008
I ran into Rich Haber right after he won his client a $46.6 million jury award last week.  Rich is a good guy and a great lawyer (like he wins the biggest award in Ohio history, and you need me to tell you that), but he readily acknowledged he’s got some ways to go before [...

Case Update

Posted on July 07, 2008
The big case out of Columbus this week was Angel v. Reed, a personal injury case arising out of an automobile accident.  The police report indicated the defendant was insured by Nationwide, but it turned out the company had cancelled his policy before the accident...

Supreme Court Recap

Posted on July 03, 2008
One of my goals in starting this blog was to create a resource for solo practitioners and small firm lawyers who don’t have the resources the big guys have for research.  In that light, today’s post is a rundown of the major US Supreme Court cases this year involving criminal law...

So what to do with Heller?

Posted on July 02, 2008
As might be expected with the recognition of any new constitutional right, 2nd Amendment law in the next few years is going to be a very interesting field.  Here are some of the questions posed for criminal law attorneys by the Supreme Court’s decision last Thursday in District of Columbia v...

Giles and forfeiture under Crawford

Posted on July 01, 2008
Giles v. California presented a pretty simple fact situation.  The defendant had shot and killed his former girlfriend.  He claimed self-defense, an assertion that was complicated by the fact that she didn’t have a weapon, and had been shot six times, at least once while she was lying on the ground...

Case Update

Posted on June 30, 2008
It’s Supreme Court week here at The Briefcase.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about the one decision left over from last week, Giles v. California, which presented a Crawford question.  On Wednesday I’ll have a recap of some of the questions facing defense attorneys handling gun charges in the aftermath of Heller...

Yin and Yang

Posted on June 27, 2008
First there’s this story: The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, had a problem. The murder convictions of two men in one of his office?s big cases ? the 1990 shooting of a bouncer outside the Palladium nightclub ? had been called into question by a stream of new evidence...

Heller Update: What the Court giveth…

Posted on June 26, 2008
… the Court taketh away.  I was going to do a post on the Supreme Court’s Heller gun rights decision tomorrow, but I’ll do a quick post on it today, so you’ll get two posts for the price of one; the one on Kennedy v. Louisiana, the child rape case, is right below this...

Supreme Court Update I - Kennedy v. Louisiana

Posted on June 26, 2008
It’s somewhat understandable that 4th Amendment jurisprudence would be, in the words of the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, “something other than a seamless web.”  A simple glance at the Amendment reveals a multitude of terms which might cause mischief:  what is “unreasonable”?  What does “probable cause” mean?  How particular does a description in a warrant [...

Update

Posted on June 25, 2008
The Supreme Court came down with three fairly significant decisions today:  in Kennedy v. Louisiana, they struck down the Louisiana statute making child rape subject to the death penalty.  In Giles v. California, they held that a defendant doesn’t forfeit his right to confrontation under Crawford by wrongdoing against the witness (in this case, the wrongdoing was fairly [...

The fallout from Moore

Posted on June 25, 2008
Back in February, I blogged about the US Supreme Court’s decision in Virginia v. Moore.  (Here’s the post.)  Moore had been arrested for driving under suspension, and a search of the car turned up drugs.  One problem:  driving under suspension wasn’t an arrestable offense under Virginia law, so the court tossed the evidence...

Gay rights

Posted on June 24, 2008
Lots of news on the gay rights front.  Following the decision by the California Supreme Court back in May that gays had a fundamental right to marry, they’ve been doing just that.  Of course, California being the home of ballot initiatives, there’s one in November which would overturn the decision...

Case Update

Posted on June 23, 2008
The US Supreme Court released seven decisions last week, the most significant, at least for the people who read this blog, being Indiana v. Edwards.  The defendant in that case suffered from schizophrenia, and had no fewer than three competency hearings...

Friday Roundup

Posted on June 20, 2008
Bad boys, what you gonna do?  Not a good past few weeks for the six percent of the American public which still holds lawyers in high regard.  There was this: A closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit [...

State v. Gardner recap

Posted on June 19, 2008
The defendant goes to a house, gets into an argument with the homeowner, breaks down the door, then assaults the homeowner, points a gun at him, and threatens to kill him.  Those are the (substantially) stripped down facts in State v. Gardner, decided yesterday by the Supreme Court...

Actual innocence and mistaken identification

Posted on June 18, 2008
“Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted.” That observation was made by Judge Learned Hand in a case back in 1923.  Those of us in the criminal justice system keep that ghost at bay by reminding ourselves that the vast majority of accused criminals plead guilty, and that with [...

Another day in the life

Posted on June 17, 2008
I go out to a local municipal court for the preliminary hearing on a murder case. It’s scheduled for 1:30, but it looks like several other things are scheduled for that time, too. The judge’s lunch for one; she’s heading out the door as I’m walking in...

Case Update

Posted on June 16, 2008
The big decision out of Washington last week, of course, was the Court’s fourth smackdown of the Bush administration’s policy on detainees.  In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush back in 2004, the Court held that US citizens detained on American soil had to be given a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their detention, and [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on June 13, 2008
There oughta be a law, Vol. 47.  Two scourges of American law in the past several decades — the idea that any bad result should be the subject of legislative remedy, and the unfortunate tendency to name those remedies after the victims of the bad results — have combined to produce the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention [...

Act in haste, repent at leisure

Posted on June 12, 2008
I’ve mentioned before that the 8th District is arguably the most 4th-Amendment-friendly appellate court in the state, and that view was further vindicated last week in State v. Alexander.  The police had received info from that old standby, the “confidential informant,” that Alexander was selling drugs out of his house...

Overwhelming evidence

Posted on June 11, 2008
If you skim over the 8th District’s decision in State v. Fears last week, you’re probably not going to find anything out of the ordinary.  The defendant had been convicted of gross sexual imposition, and he appealed, claiming that the court had erred in allowing in certain evidence, the prosecutor had committed misconduct in closing [...

Crime in the City

Posted on June 10, 2008
Looks like there’ll be an uptick in the Cleveland body count. Last July 4, Terrance Hough decided that he’d had enough of his next-door neighbors setting off fireworks.  So, after grabbing the .40 caliber semiautomatic he kept on a kitchen shelf, he marched next door to confront 24-year-old Jacob Feichtner...

Case Update

Posted on June 09, 2008
About a year and a half ago, I detailed two 8th District decisions regarding Children & Family Services and sovereign immunity.  In the first case, discussed here, C&FS had been sued for leaving an abused child in custody of her mother, who shortly thereafter killed her...

Friday Roundup

Posted on June 06, 2008
Outtakes from the War on Drugs.  This article from Reason magazine’s online edition features a walk-down-memory-lane refresher course for us boomers of the best (i.e., most absurd) anti-drug commercials of the past several decades, including chucklers like these: ? Pee-Wee Herman Says No to Crack?and Jail Time...

Talkin’ baseball

Posted on June 05, 2008
For sports fans at least, the most significant decision out of the US Supreme Court this past week might have been a case they decided not to hear. I’m in a Strat-o-Matic baseball league.  Strat, as it’s known, is a Mom-and-Pop company which started producing a baseball simulation back in the early 1960’s...

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