Case Update

Got two weeks of stuff to plow through, so let's get to it...  Last week's dog-bites-man story out of the Ohio Supreme Court was the decision nullifying Gov. Strickland's veto of the bill passed in a twilight session of the legislature last year essentially gutting a large portion of Ohio's consumer protections.  The Court also upheld Toledo's pit bull ordinance against constitutional attack, in Vick v. Toledo.  And yes, I did make that name up; the case is actually Toledo v. Tellings

In the courts of appeals, a judge in a legal malpractice lawsuit arising out of a divorce case had issued an order compelling the production of the plaintiff's successor attorney's file; the 1st District reversed it on the grounds that the judge should have conducted a hearing first, and the opinion contains an excellent discussion of attorney-client privilege and work product in that context.  And while you're standing in line for the elevators at the Justice Center here in Cleveland, you might want to check out these 8th District decisions on when a court can dismiss a case or grant a default judgment for failure of the other side to appear at a pretrial. 

The 8th District rejects a disproportionality argument on a 29-year sentence for aggravated burglary, attempted murder, kidnapping, and escape.  The 5th District holds that defendant's arrest for a post-release control violation didn't automatically terminate PRC, and police could still conduct a warrantless search of his house, because granting consent to such a search was a condition of PRC.  The 11th District vacates a plea because the trial court didn't make an inquiry of defendant's reasons for requesting new counsel on the day of trial.  The 10th District reverses a community-control sentence on a second-degree felony, holding that the trial court failed to make the findings necessary to overcome the presumption for a prison sentence.  The 12th District upholds an arson conviction where a student tossed a "bottle rocket" into a trashcan, saying that the explosion, which only melted part of the liner of the can and produced some smoke, was still sufficient to warrant conviction under the statute.

And in the Somebody Didn't Get the Memo Department:  the trial court in State v. Grimes imposed a ten-year consecutive sentence on two robbery counts, stating that "a minimum sentence would demean the seriousness of the offenses" and "would not adequately protect the public," and that "consecutive sentences are necessary to protect the public" and "to adequately punish the defendant."  All those judicial findings, of course, were eliminated by State v. Foster.  Which had been decided six weeks earlier...

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