Ohio

Divining intent

Posted on July 28, 2010
The 132 members of the Ohio House and Senate kill whole forests in churning out legislation each year, from the mundane, like this bill designating Ohio’s Official Prehistoric Monument, to the groundbreaking, like this one, requiring confessions in major cases to be video- and audio-recorded, and establishing rules for identification procedures...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on July 27, 2010
As you know, every Tuesday I do a summary of the 8th District’s decisions from the previous week.  Last week there were 28 of them.  Maybe I’ll move to Athens, Ohio.  I’ll not only get to ogle college coeds, but reporting on the goings-on of the 4th District is about as challenging as being the [...

Case Update

Posted on July 26, 2010
SCOTUS may be taking its summer vacation (that’s Justice Sotomayor, reflecting on her first year on the Court), but the gang in Columbus has started churning out cases again.  Three of them concern adoption:  in In re Adoption of GV and In re Adoption of PAC, the court holds that a probate court must refrain [...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 23, 2010
Once a con, always a con.  Daryl Simon didn’t go in for those low-rent scams, like calling old ladies and telling them they’d just won the Botswana Lottery and needed to send him a grand to pay the taxes before he sent them their check for $24 million...

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Indigent defense

Posted on July 22, 2010
A revolution always starts somewhere.  This one might have started with Kimberly Hurrell-Harring trying to smuggle marijuana in to her husband, who was a resident of a New York state correctional facility.  Her lawyer, Patrick Barber, told her that she had no options but to plead guilty to a felony...

Loopholes

Posted on July 21, 2010
I’m not a detail guy.  My buddy Paul is; he’s the one who figured out that you couldn’t use a 5th degree felony to impeach a witness.  (Check it out; under EvidR 609, you can impeach someone with a crime that was “punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year”; a felony five [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on July 20, 2010
How bad were things for criminal defendants at the Lakeside this week?  Bad enough that the State won two, count’em, two suppression cases.  There was a reversal of a municipal court conviction, which is pretty much of a dog-bites-man story anymore, but other than that, nada...

Case Update

Posted on July 19, 2010
The birthday went quite well, thanks for asking.  I had told the others in my office that I didn’t want anyone spending more than $50 for a birthday present for me, and I can happily report that no one had any problem complying with that request...

Supreme Court Recap – 2009 Term

Posted on July 15, 2010
As I’ve done for the last several years, here’s a recap of the major US Supreme Court decisions of the past term, focusing on criminal and civil liberties issues.  I give a brief summary of each decision, plus a link to a post where I discussed the case in more detail, if in fact I [...

Open Discovery – A User’s Guide

Posted on July 14, 2010
I gave a summary of the provisions of the new CrimR 16, which provides for open discovery.  Now it’s time to take a closer look at some of the issues that can arise in actual practice. The first thing to look at, as a defense attorney, is what you’re not getting...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on July 13, 2010
Clothes make the man, especially if “Cuyahoga County Jail” is stenciled on the back of them, sometimes a woman is a man, and if you’re a woman and go to a place called “Bum’s Saloon,” you probably shouldn’t be surprised if you get into a fight with another woman...

Case Update

Posted on July 12, 2010
Well, SCOTUS’s term has ended, and the Ohio Supreme Court didn’t favor us with any decisions over the past week, so we’ll just go to the court of appeals cases.  In a minute; first, though, an important announcement.  No Briefcase on Friday, since I will be celebrating my birthday...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 09, 2010
Splitting Hairs Department.  One thing that being a lawyer teaches you is an appreciation for the nuances of language.  There’s a difference between “prior calculation and design,” for example, and “premeditation.”  Contract lawyers get paid lots and lots of money to pore over contracts to ensure that every last phrase has been drained of any [...

So what’s McDonald mean?

Posted on July 08, 2010
Two years ago, when the Supreme Court decided in District of Columbia v. Heller that the 2nd Amendment granted an individual right to bear arms, rather than the collective right that virtually every court decision prior to that had recognized, I made numerous predictions about the significant impact the decision was going to have...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on July 07, 2010
How rare is it for a criminal case to be dismissed for a speedy trial violation?  According to the 2007 Ohio Court Report (the latest one available on the Supreme Court website), of 99,779 criminal cases disposed of that year, only 84 — 8/100ths of a percent — were dismissed for that reason...

Case Update

Posted on July 06, 2010
The Supreme Court’s 2009 term ends, with the big decision being McDonald v. City of Chicago, holding that the 2nd Amendment’s individual right to bear arms pronounced two years ago in District of Columbia v. Heller also applies to the states...

Friday Roundup

Posted on July 02, 2010
Back to the Future.  For those of us who grew up in the 60’s, having your own FBI file was a rite of passage.  Of course, we didn’t know it at the time; it wasn’t until later that the full extent of spying on domestic organizations was revealed...

Open discovery is here!

Posted on July 01, 2010
So Tuesday morning I’m sitting in my office when I get a panicked call from my good buddy John Martin, the appellate guru over at the county public defender’s office.  While Martin is extremely comfortable in the appeals court setting — in his last oral argument before the Supreme Court, the justices invited him back [...

The Whimsy of Search & Seizure Law

Posted on June 30, 2010
Yesterday I promised to take a look at four cases from the 8th dealing with search issues.  If I were writing children’s books instead of a legal blog, I’d probably entitle this post The State’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week in 4th Amendment Cases...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on June 29, 2010
Four, count ‘em, four search decisions out of the 8th, so they get their own blog post tomorrow.  In other cases from the 8th last week, the degeneration of the English language that technology has wrought continues apace, another judge is reminded that the abuse of discretion standard isn’t triggered unless you exercise some, and [...

Case Update

Posted on June 28, 2010
One of the things I learned in the past two weeks is that, in a hospital, a nurse telling you that the doctor will be with you shortly means the exact same thing as a bailiff in courtroom telling you that the judge will be with you shortly. The penultimate week in the Supreme Court’s current [...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on June 22, 2010
Only nine opinions last week, about than half the usual output.  But the 8th District does close the book on two big cases – Lynn Kelley has a good week, Terrance Hough has a bad one – so let’s take a look. Asbestos litigation in America so far has involved 6,000 defendants and 100 times that many claimants; the total [...

Case Update

Posted on June 21, 2010
Despite the fact I write a blog, I’m pretty much an idiot savant when it comes to technology; I’ve never even sent a text message.  Jeff Quon, a member of the SWAT team of Ontario, California, can’t make that claim:  during a single month, he sent 456 of them over his department-issued pager...

Another stab at Crawford

Posted on June 18, 2010
Ever since the US Supreme Court revolutionized 6th Amendment jurisprudence with its 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, courts have wrestled with the issue of exactly what constitutes a “testimonial” statement under Crawford.  The Ohio Supreme Court’s done it three times, and took another shot at the issue yesterday in State v...

Incarceration Nation

Posted on June 17, 2010
The United States now incarcerates 753 out of every 100,000 of its adult citizens.  We’re No. 1, by a huge margin:  Poland is second, with 240.  Most of the Western European nations aren’t even in the rear-view mirror, averaging about a tenth of our rate...

Swinging for the fences

Posted on June 16, 2010
You’ve got to give the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office credit for thinking big.  Faced with an adverse appellate decision on a search issue, they decided to go for the home run.  After the oral argument in the Supreme Court last week, it looks like they dribbled a grounder to second...

What’s Up in the 8th

Posted on June 15, 2010
Burnes Lottie finds out that “the more the merrier” isn’t the best philosophy for deciding whom to invite to your sentencing, and the 8th District’s ouevre this week provides us with Reason #384 why I don’t do divorce work...

Case Update

Posted on June 14, 2010
While there are still 24 cases to be decided by the US Supreme Court before its term ends in two weeks, only three came down this past week, all involving Federal issues:  Barber v. Thomas concerned good-time credits for Federal prisoners, and Hamilton v...

Bitch-SLAPP

Posted on June 11, 2010
Justin Kurtz was pissed.  T&J Towing had hauled his car away from his apartment complex, and so he created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.”  That landed him in court:  T&J, claiming that the site was hurting their business, filed a $750,000 defamation suit against Kurtz...

Avant le deluge

Posted on June 10, 2010
There are still a number of important US Supreme Court decisions in the pipeline, and they’ll be coming out in the next couple of the weeks as the Court wraps up its term.  And the Ohio Supreme Court can always provide entertainment, as it did with its recent holding that a cop’s unaided estimation of [...

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