The other big case out of the Supreme Court last week was State v. Geeslin.  Geeslin had been stopped for a DUI, and the stop and arrest had been videotaped by the officer.  Subsequently, it turned out that the officer had accidentally taped over the portion leading up to the stop.  The defendant argued that the destruction of the evidence entitled him to a dismissal of the charges.  The trial court agreed, but the court of appeals reversed.  (keep reading…)

The first big decision out of the Ohio Supreme Court last week was State v. Muttart, a case in which the defendant had been convicted of three counts of raping his four-year daughter.  The trial court had allowed the doctors and nurses to testify to statements made to them by the daughter.  The appellate court had reversed one of the convictions, holding that before the hearsay statements could be admitted, the trial court had to determine that the child was a competent witness under Evidence Rule 601(A).  (keep reading…)

There were a couple of significant decisions out of the Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday.  One involved the admissibility of statements by a child to doctor in a child sex abuse case, and the other dealt with the due process ramifications of the destruction of evidence by the police.  I’ll talk about the first one tomorrow, and the second on Wednesday.  Meanwhile, in the courts of appeals… (keep reading…)

I finally figured out a way to turn the comments feature on without getting bombarded by spam.  So, in keeping with Thursday’s post about professionalism, you can call me a lying buttweasel to your heart’s content.

A faithful reader — and their number is legion — took me to task in an email yesterday for not mentioning that one of the cases up for oral argument this week in the Ohio Supreme Court was Hyle v. Porter. Mea culpa, as we say in the law biz. The case does indeed have serious ramifications in the unending quest to impose ever-more-restrictive limitations on where sex offenders can reside, which may reach its apogee if the City of Newton, New Jersey, goes through with its plan to take such restrictions to their logical conclusion: banning sex offenders from living anywhere in the city.  (keep reading…)

The lack of civility in the legal profession has been the subject of innumerable anguished articles in bar magazines for the past couple of decades or so, to the extent that the Ohio Supreme Court decided several years ago to mandate continuing legal education on the subject, tossing an hour of “professionalism” on top of the required ninety minutes on ethics and substance abuse.  But just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, along comes a Michigan federal judge to remind us that your calling opposing counsel a lying buttweasel might have First Amendment ramifications. (keep reading…)

The Biggie before the Nine Robed Ones, of course, is the crack-cocaine case.  As most criminal lawyers know, Federal law provide a 100-1 disparity in sentencing:  you can get the same time for possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine as you can get for possessing 500 grams of powder.  At issue in the Supreme Court case is the fate or Richard Kimbrough, a former Gulf War vet who turned to dealing in crack.  He pled guilty to trafficking, and the Sentencing Guidelines would’ve given him a sentence between 19 and 22 years.  The judge labeled that “ridiculous,” and instead handed down a slap on the wrist of a mere 15 years.  That wasn’t good enough for the government, which appealed, nor the appellate court, which reversed the sentence on the grounds that the judge hadn’t given a good enough reason for such a large downward departure. 

So apparently, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide whether adequate grounds for departure are “this law’s so stupid it makes my bones hurt.”  (keep reading…)

There are a number of things going on in the Supreme Court, both in Ohio and the US, and today I wanted to follow up on a couple of rulings from the latter last week.  Tomorrow I’ll touch on some pending cases before both.

The first case from last week is Terry v. Caputo, which involved one of the new faves in personal injury law, mold; the issue was the expert testimony necessary to get past summary judgment.  The plaintiff’s expert had testified that mold in general can cause the health problems from which the plaintiffs suffered, but the trial court concluded that the expert’s testimony as to specific causation in this case didn’t meet acceptable scientific standards.  The court of appeals agreed, but reversed the grant of summary judgment, holding that the remaining evidence created a “genuine dispute of fact.”

The Supreme Court reversed that, and, as I said, the holding is pretty simple:  (keep reading…)

The big national legal news over the past week, of course, was Britney Spears losing custody of her children.  Jeez, who coulda seen that coming, huh?  In Ohio, the man-bites-dog story was the Supreme Court’s reversal of a death penalty case; the prosecutor had failed to turn over police reports implicating someone else in the crime, and the defense lawyers should have argued that the defendant’s wife couldn’t testify.  The Court did affirm a death penalty case, too, just to make sure that the earth didn’t fall off its axis.

There were a couple of civil cases of note, too, one affecting how appeals in sovereign immunity cases are handled, and another dealing with expert testimony on medical causation.  I’ll do a post later this week on cases that are pending in the Supreme Court, and I’ll discuss those there.  On to the courts of appeals… (keep reading…)

There’s probably no better example of the “he said/she said” case than one of date rape.  There are no witnesses, at least direct ones, and forensics aren’t much help, since the defendant admits that sex occurred.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to reliably determine who was telling the truth?  (keep reading…)