Ohio

Friday’s grab-bag

Posted on March 07, 2008
Goofiness abounds.  From the Overlawyered comes the story of two private school teachers in Seattle who filed a complaint against the school for hostile workplace environment.  Whatever the merits of their other claims in that regard, they were substantially diluted by this one:  Among the plaintiffs’ complaints was [the school’s] invitation to conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza to [...

Car searches, Round 2

Posted on March 06, 2008
As Justice Frankfurter put it in a concurring opinion back in 1961, “the course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures has not — to put it mildly — run smooth.”  That’s been particularly true of vehicle searches...

A defense point of view

Posted on March 05, 2008
The 2nd District came down with an interesting, and somewhat gutsy, decision the other day in State v. Russell.  Whether it was the right one is pretty much a matter of perspective. Actually, this was the second time the case had been up before the appellate court...

Forfeiture by wrongdoing and temporal limits on searches

Posted on March 04, 2008
Sometimes when doing the Case Update I come across decisions which require, as they say in the law biz, “more extended treatment.”  Come to think of it, they probably say that in the plastic surgery biz, too.  Anyway, a little bit more on some recent decisions: Confrontation and forfeiture...

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Case Update

Posted on March 03, 2008
Nothing going on in Columbus, but the US Supreme Court this week granted cert in two criminal cases.  Pulido v. Crones is a 9th Circuit habeas decision, and might afford the Court an opportunity to decide whether a defective jury instruction is a “structural error,” which of course always necessitates reversal, or whether it can be [...

Stare decisis

Posted on February 29, 2008
Should the Ohio Supreme Court overrule its decision setting forth the standards by which the Ohio Supreme Court should determine whether to overrule its decisions?  That was the subtext of a decision by the Court last week in a workers compensation case, that could have major ramifications in criminal law...

My day off

Posted on February 28, 2008
Didn’t feel like doing much blogging today, so instead I surfed the web for legal stories, and this is what I came up with: The War on Liquor?  I’ve blogged on numerous occasions about how the War on Drugs has largely involved a War on the Fourth Amendment as well, as demonstrated most recently by the [...

Talk dirty to me

Posted on February 27, 2008
A couple weeks back, Dick Feagler, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s resident scold, penned his latest installment on why America is going to hell in a handbasket.  For those unfamiliar with his ouevre, Feagler’s columns typically cast a covetous eye back to those days of yore when men were men and women weren’t, and then focus despairingly on [...

We have a winner…

Posted on February 26, 2008
A mere two days after the Oscars, we can safely hand out the Award for the Worst Fourth Amendment Decision of the Year.  The envelope, please… Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give it up for the 9th District’s decision in State v. White.  The protagonists of our story are Steven Barrett and Cynthia White, whom the [...

Case Update

Posted on February 25, 2008
An interesting decision from the US Supreme Court this past week on retroactivity in criminal cases.  In Danforth v. Minnesota, the Court held that states are free to determine whether to grant retroactivity to US Supreme Court decisions, regardless of how the Court itself treats the issue...

Stuff that cheeses me off

Posted on February 22, 2008
I couldn’t get into the blog all day yesterday — but why I am telling you this, because you couldn’t, either — and so I come home last night to find an email from the hosting service telling me that they were “having issues” with their “upstream DNS Servers” and that my account “has probably [...

Still more on sex offender residency restrictions

Posted on February 21, 2008
I’ve written numerous times about the goofiness of sex offender residency restrictions (like I did here), in which legislatures and city councils enact ever-more restrictive laws on where sex offenders can live, despite a dearth of evidence that the laws do any good, and some evidence they’re actually harmful...

Uncounseled misdemeanor convictions, Vol. 38; Speedy trial, Vol. 49

Posted on February 20, 2008
Back in 2004, the legislature passed a new drunk-driving statute with a 20-year ”lookback” provision:  if a defendant has five or more OVI convictions in the past 20 years, the next one becomes a fourth-degree felony (punishable, oddly enough, by up to five years in prison)...

With a little help from my friends… Court costs & Intervention in Lieu

Posted on February 19, 2008
Every now and then, an attorney will give me a tip about a case that he thinks would be good for the blog.  The other day, for example, one of the habitués over at the Justice Center told me about State v. Stanovich, a decision out of the 3rd District last year on treatment in lieu of [...

Case Update

Posted on February 18, 2008
Nothing of significance in the US Supreme Court this week.  Down in Columbus, in addition to State v. Sarkozy, which I discussed on Friday, the Ohio Supreme Court decided Pruszynski v. Reeves, a decision significantly clarifying the law on prejudgment interest...

Pleas and Post-Release Controls

Posted on February 15, 2008
The law on post-release controls vis-a-vis sentencing has become pretty settled, especially following the Supreme Court’s decision last summer in State v. Bezak:  the trial judge has to advise the defendant orally of PRC at the time of sentencing, and also include that in the journal entry...

Girls just wanna have fun

Posted on February 14, 2008
You know that old Woody Allen line about how 90% of life is just showing up?  That’s particularly true if the place you’re supposed to show up is the Probation Department.  I had the sentencing this morning of a client we’ll call Sharon, who’d been convicted back in July of running a scam on some [...

After the Revolution

Posted on February 13, 2008
In January of 2005, the US Supreme Court revolutionized Federal sentencing law with its decision in US v. Booker, which held that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines were no longer mandatory, but merely advisory.  Thirteen months later, in State v. Foster, the Ohio Supreme Court revolutionized Ohio sentencing law by holding that there wasn’t any...

8th District Roundup - Massacre on Lakeside

Posted on February 12, 2008
A summary of the criminal cases handed down by the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals last week.  (Trust me, OBAR’s headnotes will not read the same way: State v. Hamilton: Defendant files motion to vacate plea two years after sentencing, primarily because he finds out he?s being deported...

Case Update

Posted on February 11, 2008
No news out of Washington, except that Dick “Darth” Cheney filed his own brief in the gun rights case pending in the Supreme Court, differing with the administration’s position.  Well, that’s not quite accurate, even though the boys over at ScotusBlog phrase it that way...

“Jamie” gets paper

Posted on February 08, 2008
A month ago, I blogged about the the two days I spent in trial defending “Jamie,” a 46-year-old transvestite accused of possessing a crackpipe, the nadir of what most observers had already concluded was an otherwise undistinguished legal career...

This and that…

Posted on February 07, 2008
McCain’s Judges.  One of the critical factors in anticipating future Supreme Court trends anymore is the demographics of the Court.  When the next president is inaugurated, four of them will be over 70; two members of the liberal wing, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who will turn 89 and 76, respectively, within a few months after [...

Magic Bus

Posted on February 06, 2008
A few months back, Clevelanders were shocked to learn that the county’s Regional Transit Authority had won the award for being the best public transportation system in North America.  This was no mean feat, considering that the city’s previous awards had been limited to Place Where You’re Most Likely to Be Shot for No Reason, or [...

News from the (drug) war front

Posted on February 05, 2008
I’m not big on the idea of drug legalization.  I don’t buy into claims like this one, that we could get $31 billion in additional revenue simply by legalizing marijuana and taxing it.  I don’t buy into the idea that decriminalizing drugs will make them safer, or that it will get rid of the criminal [...

Case Update

Posted on February 04, 2008
The big news about the US Supreme Court came out of Oregon this past week.  I’d previously blogged about the Phillip Morris case, in which an Oregon jury had nailed the company with $80 million in punitive damages in a smoker’s suit, and about how the Supreme Court had reversed the verdict...

Illegal arrests

Posted on February 01, 2008
The cops see your client standing on a street corner drinking a bottle of beer.   They arrest him for having an open container, and a search reveals several rocks of crack in his pocket.  You file a motion to suppress, pointing out at the hearing that open container is a minor misdemeanor, which, except in [...

Crawford and forfeiture

Posted on January 31, 2008
Yesterday, I talked about Crawford v. Washington, the US Supreme Court decision back in 2004 which held that if a statement is “testimonial,” it can’t be admitted, even if it falls within one of exceptions to the hearsay rule.  I also mentioned one of the exceptions to Crawford itself:  even if a statement is testimonial, [...

Getting Crawford right

Posted on January 30, 2008
Just about every criminal defense lawyer knows that Crawford v. Washington, the 2004 Supreme Court decision holding that the defendant’s confrontation rights barred admission of a ”testimonial” statement, was one of the most unexpected and sweeping changes in criminal law in the past decade or so...

Some stuff for the blogroll

Posted on January 29, 2008
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, Cleveland Mayor Frank “Sleepy-Time” Jackson has announced a campaign to get guns off the streets of the city, acknowledging that this could result in more shootouts between the police and private citizens...

Case Update

Posted on January 28, 2008
Nothing happening in Columbus.  I’ll have a post on some key cases in the US Supreme Court on Thursday.  Meanwhile, on to the courts of appeals:  Criminal.  Good case on protective sweeps:  defendant was holed up in house, held police at bay for three hours before surrendering, cops do a sweep after that, 2nd District reverses [...

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