Holiday Roundup
Auto eroticism. It was just what you needed to bust a big
drug case: a combination of fortuity,
alertness, and teamwork. Dayton Det.
Raymond St. Clair was the one who spotted the suspect, Eric Flanagan, first. He saw Flanagan driving on Xenia Ave., followed
him in his unmarked car for ten or fifteen minutes, then watched as Flanagan
pulled behind on industrial building. It
was about 8:20 in the evening, just when, as St. Clair testified, the sun was
setting and it was "getting close to getting dusk."
This wasn't the kind of thing a police officer would tackle
on his own. St. Clair stayed out of
sight, approaching the south side of the building on foot, and peered around
the corner, spotting Flanagan's car parked on the west side of the
building. Backup soon arrived in the
form of three additional detectives.
They carefully plotted their attack, and all that tactical
training at the police academy paid off.
St. Clair rushed the car on foot, while the other detectives raced up to
it in two vehicles with their high beams on.
So how many kilos of heroin or crack or meth did the police
recover? Well, actually, all this wasn't
done to nail Flanagan for dealing drugs.
It was to arrest him for getting a blow job in a car.
Charged with public indecency, Flanagan took the stand to
deny that any sexual activity had taken place.
He explained that he and the young lady were friends and had simply gone
behind the building to "talk privately and to drink beer," leaving unexplained
why this would involve pulling his pants down to his knees, and having his
ladyfriend with her head in his lap. (The
theory that she was merely resting took a hit from one detective's testimony
that when he approached, the woman "became startled and sat up, exposing
Flanagan's penis to the detectives.")
A jury convicted Flanagan, but it all goes away with the 2nd
District's reversal last week in State
v. Flanagan. Noting that the statute requires that a
defendant engage in conduct which "is likely to be viewed by and affront others
who are in the person's physical proximity and who are not members of the
person's household," the court concluded that there was "no evidence to support
a finding that Flanagan engaged in such conduct under circumstances in which it
was likely to be viewed by others," observing that only the "extraordinary
efforts" of the detectives had allowed them to see it.
Besides the obvious profound precedential impact of Flanagan, one comes away from the case
with several impressions:
- Dayton detectives really, really, really do not have enough to do
- The people in Dayton are a serious and hardy lot, because you couldn't get five minutes into this trial in Cuyahoga County without the lawyers, judge, and jurors giggling themselves stupid.
Here's a judge who
never listened to Bob Dylan's The
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. There's
a part of you that wants to feel sorry for Ethan Couch. He's only 16 years old. Then again, you definitely feel sorry for the
families of Brian Jennings, Hollie and Shelby Boyles, and Breanna
Mitchell. Those are the four people Couch
killed while driving with a blood/alcohol level three times the legal limit for
an adult.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the most you can
get in Ohio for killing somebody while you're driving drunk is eight years in
prison. Of course, sometimes prosecutors
get creative in their charging, or multiple victims allow consecutive
sentences. We've had a number of such
cases here in Cleveland over the years; one woman drove the wrong way on I-71
for eight miles before plowing into a couple coming home from their wedding and
killing them. She wound up with 18
years, as I remember. Couch is 16, but the
newspaper stories describe one of the victims as a "youth pastor," and two of
the four victims were in their early 20's.
Plus, a fifth passenger was left a paraplegic. Frankly, I don't see Couch walking out of
more than a handful of courtrooms across the street with less than a double-digit
sentence.
That's exactly what a Tarrant County, Texas, judge did last
week, imposing on Couch ten full years -- of probation.
Various organizations annually anoint certain words as the new
word of the year. It was "hashtag" in
2012 for the American Dialect Society, while Oxford Dictionaries kept a stiff
upper lip and designated "omnishambles."
I think it's safe to venture that "affluenza" will be on somebody's list
for 2013.
That was Couch's defense:
he was raised by affluent parents who never set any boundaries for him, gave
him everything he wanted, and never punished him for anything. (The affluence part is undebatable: one of the conditions of probation is that
Ethan spend time in a $450,000-a-year treatment center, the cost of which will
be borne by his father.) The
psychologist whored out by the defense used the term, and explained that as a
result of his parent's gross over-indulgence, Couch lost the ability to behave
responsibly.
The country was suitably outraged by the sentence, and I'm
guessing Karma's going to come back with a roundhouse punch: Couch was driving a truck owned by a trucking
company, which is owned by Couch's father.
There are personal injury lawyers who would wet their pants at the
prospect of trying a case like that.
If this were an after-school special on the Disney Channel,
the outcome would have been clear and simple:
The best way of teaching the vitally important lesson that actions have
consequences is by showing that they do.
But then life doesn't imitate art, it's the other way
around. And one of the things the Disney
Channel doesn't teach you is that the man who said money can't buy happiness
never sat in a courtroom.
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