Ohio

DC and Columbus - Oral Arguments

Posted on January 25, 2008
Just a short note today.  I spent most of the week working on a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court, trying desperately to keep my efforts from flagging because of the near-certainty that my chances of success are two, slim and none, and Slim rode out of town a while back...

Gone surfing

Posted on January 24, 2008
This is going to be one of those days when I just take a look around the Web and see if there’s anything interesting in the legal field.  Sometimes what I find is depressing, like this commentary from the San Francisco Chronicle, highlighted over at Sentencing Law & Policy: To many in the United States, the country of Somalia [...

Privileges and Immunities

Posted on January 23, 2008
As I’ve mentioned before, doing this blog is somewhat of a humbling experience, because I’m constantly reminded of how much I don’t know. I got another reminder of that last week, when one of the lawyers here walks into my office and tells me that he’s got a case where the prosecution wants to call his [...

Laches and child support

Posted on January 22, 2008
The joys of fatherhood are somewhat tempered when you first find out about it when the kid’s headed off to her senior prom and the mother is asking you to shell out seventeen years of back child support.  Laches is one of those defenses that you may remember from law school and have never seen since, but it [...

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Case Update

Posted on January 21, 2008
Probably the biggest news out of the US Supreme Court this past week was its refusal to hear an appeal by Cleveland’s former Boy Mayor, Dennis Kucinich.  Kucinich was asking the court to order the Texas Democratic party to put him on the primary ballot, despite his refusal to sign a declaration that he would support the [...

Annie got her gun

Posted on January 18, 2008
One of the easiest predictions for the new year is that we will see the first substantive Supreme Court case ever on the 2nd Amendment.  As I’ve mentioned before, the Court has accepted review in District of Columbia v. Heller, the decision by the DC Court of Appeals which tossed out the District’s gun control [...

Throwing away the key

Posted on January 17, 2008
There’s not much question that Marquis Hairston was a bad guy.  Over a four-week period during the fall of 2005, he and some pals conducted three home invasion in the Germantown section of Columbus, terrorizing the inhabitants at gunpoint.  His spree started just seven days after he’d been released from prison for another crime...

Odds and Ends

Posted on January 16, 2008
Catching up with some stuff… Let’s hope Judge Kline doesn’t read this.  Last week I did a post on the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Crager, where it upheld the admission of DNA testimony by an analyst, other than the one who’d performed the actual tests, against a Crawford challenge...

Morality tale

Posted on January 15, 2008
Almost a year ago, I highlighted the case of Burdge v. Supervalu Holdings.  Burdge had shopped at one of the defendant’s stores, paid by credit card, and received a receipt which — the horror, the horror — contained the card’s expiration date, in violation of Ohio’s “credit card truncation” statute...

Case Update

Posted on January 14, 2008
Speaking of a updates, I’ll be doing a one-hour seminar on Thursday night for the Cuyahoga Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, on major case developments in criminal law over the past year.  It’s at 6:00 PM at John Q’s, so drop by if you’d like...

Going after guns

Posted on January 11, 2008
Last year, 134 people were murdered in the City of Cleveland.  That was the highest number in thirteen years.  So yesterday, Mayor Frank “Rip Van Winkle” Jackson woke up long enough to announce a new policy to combat that.  As this article notes, the centerpiece to the policy is “to unleash aggressive police officers for [...

A Day in the Life

Posted on January 10, 2008
If you happen to need advice on how to prepare a jury in voir dire for the fact that you’re client’s a transvestite, I’m the go-to guy there. I spent the last two days trying a crackpipe case involving a 46-year-old transvestite — we’ll call her Jamie — with twenty-seven prior convictions, almost all of them for [...

Speedy trial with a vengeance

Posted on January 09, 2008
Portage County Judge John Plough made news last year by holding Brian Jones, a public defender, in contempt for refusing to go forward with a trial in a misdemeanor assault case.  Jones felt he had a pretty good reason for refusing:  he’d been appointed to represent the defendant only the day before the trial...

Anticipatory search warrants, and some puzzlers from the 8th

Posted on January 08, 2008
Every now and then doing this blog makes me feel dumb.  I like to think of myself as fairly knowledgeable about search and seizure law, but last week I’m preparing the case update and I run across State v. Blevins, a case out of the 3rd District on anticipatory search warrants...

Case Update - Party Edition

Posted on January 07, 2008
Apparently, opinion-writing took second place to some hard partying in the courthouses across the state.  The Columbus Gang handed down an affirmance in a death penalty case, and issued one other case announcement, and there’s fairly slim pickings in the court of appeals, too...

Scientific tests and Crawford

Posted on January 04, 2008
The state sends blood samples out to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation – Ohio’s counterpart to CSI – for DNA analysis.  The tests determine that the victim’s blood is on the defendant’s shirt, and based largely on those results, the defendant is convicted of aggravated murder...

Fourth time’s the charm

Posted on January 03, 2008
When the Ohio legislature enacted its latest batch of tort reforms in 2005, it must have had in mind Einstein’s definition of insanity:  repeatedly performing the same act with the expectation of different results.  Thirty years before, and then again in 1987 and 1997, the General Assembly had passed a variety of supposed “reforms,” only [...

Case Update - Survivor Edition

Posted on January 02, 2008
You’d think that if I’m going to take a week-long break from blogging, the courts of Ohio would have the common decency to take a vacation from handing down opinions, too.  Not so much; my buddy Lexis advises me that no fewer than 438 decisions have come down since my last case update...

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