Ohio

When being silent doesn’t mean you want to remain silent

Posted on June 09, 2010
Last year was the Big Year for 4th Amendment cases in the US Supreme Court.  This year is shaping up as the Big Year for the 5th Amendment.  While defendants went one for three last year, losing in Herring v. US and Arizona v. Johnson before staging an imprehensive come-from-behind win in Arizona v...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on June 08, 2010
On the day of trial, your client gets cold feet:  he wants to take the deal the state’s offered him.  You talk to the prosecutor, the deal’s still available, and it offers a reasonable resolution of the matter, without necessitating the expenditure of scarce judicial resources, like, say, spending a week in trial...

Case Update

Posted on June 07, 2010
The big case out of DC was Berghuis v. Thompkins, involving the question of when a suspect properly invokes or waives his Miranda rights.  I promised to do something on that last week, but the Monster Cage Death Match interfered.  (“How’d that go, Russ?”  Well, let’s put it this way, I’ve always been a military history [...

What Bodyke means

Posted on June 04, 2010
First, it means that my prognosticative abilities are no better than your friendly neighborhood crack addict’s; I’d predicted two weeks ago that the Supreme Court wouldn’t tackle an issue like sex offender registration and notification in an election year...

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It was the liquor talking

Posted on June 04, 2010
Yet another reason I shouldn’t rush to get posts out early in the morning.  Of course there’s nothing wrong with the prospective application of the AWA.  Even assuming it’s punitive, there’s no more problem with the legislature prospectively imposing the additional sanction of registration and notification than there is with the legislature prospectively  increasing the [...

One of the problems…

Posted on June 03, 2010
… of having to work for a living is that sometimes you don’t have the time to do stuff like this.  Which I haven’t this week; I’ve got a Monster Death Cage Match hearing today, and I’ve had to spend so much time on it that I haven’t had any to peruse the big US [...

8th District Roundup

Posted on June 02, 2010
There’s ineffective assistance of counsel, and then there’s really ineffective assistance of counsel.  My Cousin Vinnie was a great movie, but life doesn’t always imitate art, as Charles Dobson learned to his sorrow. Dobson and two other masked men – neither of which, apparently, were the Lone Ranger — were alleged to have broken into a home [...

Case Update

Posted on June 01, 2010
SCOTUS handed down six decisions last week, two of some significance (well, to me, anyway).  US v. Marcus involved a defendant convicted of sex trafficking from the period 1998 to 2001.  The law hadn’t gone into effect, though, until 2000, and on appeal Marcus argued that the judge had erred by not instructing the jury that pre-enactment conduct [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on May 28, 2010
No way this guy “lacks insight.”  One of the good career decisions I made was starting up this blog.  It’s gotten me business, and gives some people the illusion that I know what I’m talking about, which is usually to my advantage...

Of guns and marijuana

Posted on May 27, 2010
Under Ohio law, it’s a third degree felony to possess a gun if you’re under indictment or have been convicted of a felony offense of violence, or any drug offense.   Two years ago, in State v. Clay (discussed here), the Ohio Supreme Court held that in order to convict a defendant of the “under indictment” prong, [...

Allied offenses and “societal” interests

Posted on May 26, 2010
There’s not too much question that Fred Johnson is a bad guy:  when giving a reading lesson to his girlfriend’s seven-year-old son, he took umbrage that the boy couldn’t pronounce “family,” and beat him to death.  He was acquitted of the aggravated murder charge, but was convicted of felonious assault, two counts of felony murder, [...

What’s up in the 8th

Posted on May 25, 2010
Lessons on how to pick a jury, how to get a search consent form signed, and how to get information if you’re a cop.  A half-dozen decisions from the 8th this past week, none of them in the case I argued waaaaay back on January 4th, but in one the judges decide to all hang [...

Case Update

Posted on May 24, 2010
You rent a hotel room, and when you check your bill, you see you’ve been charged 6.5% for county and municipal taxes.  Except the county and municipal government don’t have taxes on hotel rooms.  You sue the hotel management company, but are informed by the trial and appellate courts that you have to sue the [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on May 21, 2010
March of Technology, Chapter 27.  True love never runs smooth, but modernization is making it even more turbulent.  Last month I told you about Phillip Sherman, who’d left his cell phone at a McDonald’s.  He called and learned that the manager had found it, and elicited the manager’s promise that he would keep it in [...

A peak inside Bodyke?

Posted on May 20, 2010
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Ohio Supreme Court still hasn’t come down with its decision in State v. Bodyke, the case challenging the constitutionality of the Adam Walsh Act, despite having held oral argument on the case back in November...

No to JLWOP

Posted on May 19, 2010
Would Clarence Thomas really support the execution of a seven-year old?  That was actually the most definitive answer given in the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday in Graham v. Florida.  Terrence Graham robbed a restaurant when he was 16, was prosecuted as an adult, but was placed on probation after writing a letter to the [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on May 18, 2010
There will come a time when everybody figures out post-release controls.  That time is not today.  That, a tattoo party gone wrong, and Joanne Schneider gets bad news about her sentence are the featured stories this week. The investors in Joanne Schneider’s enterprise, which consisted of buying, rehabilitating, and then renting commercial properties, had a pretty [...

Case Update

Posted on May 17, 2010
Expect a deluge of decisions from SCOTUS when it goes back into session on Monday.  Maybe.  If not, I’m sure the Ohio Supreme Court decisions will give me plenty to write about.  Like they didn’t last week; their only output was futzing around with scheduling a few more executions...

Friday Roundup

Posted on May 14, 2010
Yeah, but Ohio State had a lot more guys go in the NFL draft.  Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Dave Bernstein points out The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale.  His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, [...

Another look at rape shield

Posted on May 13, 2010
Your client is charged with rape.  He wants to testify that it was consensual, and that the victim was actually a prostitute who enticed him to go to her apartment with an offer of sex, then claimed rape in order to get his money.  No, your client’s not going to testify to that, says the [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on May 12, 2010
Our old friend allied offenses drops by for a visit (four of them, in fact), but the state learns again that the 8th District is not their friend on 4th Amendment cases, as the court hands down only a dozen decisions this week, eleven of them criminal...

Case Update – Appellate Edition

Posted on May 11, 2010
We looked at the US and Ohio Supreme Court decisions yesterday, so we’ll pop the top and take a gander at the appellate decisions from the past week today… Eric Walker, a minor, was badly injured in an auto accident, and through his father sued and obtained a judgment of $183,000, presenting evidence of medical bills [...

Case Update – Supreme Court Edition

Posted on May 10, 2010
May’s the busy month for SCOTUS:  oral arguments are over, and there’s nothing left to do but write and exchange the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions in the forty-two cases still left to be decided.  Future generations will probably not be debating the consequences of the two decisions handed down this past week...

Friday Roundup

Posted on May 07, 2010
Connect the dots.  First this:  On Tuesday, in State v. Prade, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed a lower court determination that a defendant wasn’t entitled to new DNA testing.  Prade had been convicted of killing his wife, a doctor, and the lab coat she was wearing at the time she was killed showed a bite mark, but DNA testing [...

Preparation, preparation, preparation

Posted on May 06, 2010
Napoleon is supposed to have said that he preferred lucky generals to good ones.  He would’ve liked me. My client Barry has a big problem.  Oddly enough, it’s not the case I’m representing him on, which involves a few rocks of crack that the police had found on him after they’d stopped his car for a [...

Justice delayed

Posted on May 05, 2010
Back when I started practicing in 1975, there were 34 judges on the Common Pleas bench here in Cuyahoga County, and they handled about 2500 criminal cases a year.  Now, we have the same number of judges, but they handle ten times as many criminal cases...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on May 04, 2010
There was only one win for defendants in the near-dozen cases the 8th District produced this week, but it’s such a biggie that it gets its own post tomorrow.  The rest of the crop: Charles Johnstone was, in some ways, a lucky man:  he was one of the few defendants whose identification process was so bad [...

Case Update

Posted on May 03, 2010
As I mentioned last week, SCOTUS has ended oral arguments for the term; among the most notable last week was Doe v. Reed, in which the Court is asked to decide whether a state public records law requires the disclosure of signers of an anti-gay-marriage ballot petition initiative...

Friday Roundup

Posted on April 30, 2010
Wasted youth.  As Jim Croce might have put it, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the that old Lone Ranger, and you don’t screw with a Federal judge.  Or his clerks...

Who we are

Posted on April 29, 2010
I go to Phoenix every spring for five or six days.  I started doing that a few years back, when I spent an entire winter in Cleveland and resolved that if I had to crawl over broken glass to go to someplace warm, I was never going to do that again.  Phoenix is a nice place [...

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