Case Update
The big decision from SCOTUS last week was Maryland v. King (discussed here last Wednesday) which
narrowly upheld a Maryland permitting the police to obtain DNA samples from
anyone arrested for a "serious" offense.
Another case received less attention, and more cursory treatment: in Nevada v.
Jackson, the Court in a brief per
curiam opinion reversed the 9th Circuit's decision in a habeas case. Jackson had been charged with raping his
ex-girlfriend, and had been allowed to cross-examine the victim at trial
regarding false allegations of rape she'd allegedly made against him in the
past, but the trial court had refused to allow him to introduce extrinsic
evidence, such as police reports and testimony by the officers who'd
investigated those allegations. The 9th
Circuit held that this violated Jackson's right to "present a defense," but the
Court unanimously disagrees. The result is due almost entirely to the
limitations the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act places on defendants
seeking habeas relief. The law was
passed in 1995 to limit habeas claims, and it has exceeded probably beyond its
advocates' wildest imagination. One of
the restrictions is that the state court decision has to involve "an
unreasonable application of clearly established Federal law, as determined by
the Supreme Court of the United States."
There simply is no such decision, the Court noting that as long as the
defendant is given expansive scope on cross-examination, the admission of
extrinsic evidence is a matter for state laws and rules.
Nothing new from Columbus, so let's head over to the courts
of appeals...
Case A: the defendant's
conviction for drunk driving is based on a traffic stop for exiting a municipal
parking lot in violation of posted signs; it turns out the sign wasn't
authorized by the city council, as required by law. Case B:
the defendant's conviction for drunk driving is based on a traffic stop
for making an illegal u-turn; it turns out the defendant didn't make an illegal
u-turn, because a u-turn wasn't prohibited on that street. Are both stops valid?
The stop in Case A is; those are the facts in the Supreme
Court's 2006 decision in Bowling
Green v. Godwin, holding that a
police officer's mistake of fact -- he didn't know that the council hadn't authorized
the signs -- didn't invalidate the stop.
Case B presents the factual situation in State
v. Babcock, the 6th District's decision last week reversing the denial of
the motion to suppress: the court there
found that the officer's mistake was one of law, and a mistake of that nature
can't provide reasonable suspicion. I've
tackled this issue before, in my discussion of the 8th District's 2011 decision
in State
v. Fears (here),
and the 6th cites Fears. Basically, if the police have a reasonable
belief that you've committed a traffic violation (red light, signal), even if
you haven't, the stop's good. But if
what you've done isn't a violation of the law, their belief that it is doesn't
give them a basis for a stop.
Sometimes a civil case can have an application to criminal
cases, and the 8th District's decision in Burton
v. Unifirst, an age discrimination lawsuit, contains some good law on juror misconduct. Prospective jurors were quizzed as to their
involvement in prior litigation, and one of the jurors, a doctor, responded that
he was "proud to say in 33 years of practice I've never been sued for
malpractice." He was left on the jury,
which returned a defense verdict, and a week after that the plaintiff's attorneys
did some digging and found that the juror had actually been sued for
malpractice three times. The trial judge
refused to grant a new trial, but the 8th reverses. The case law on this is actually pretty
stringent: the moving party not only has
to show that the juror lied, but that an accurate response would have provided
a valid basis for a for-cause challenge.
I'm not sure that Burton satisfies
that second requirement; a truthful answer would have led to a for-cause
challenge only if the juror had subsequently admitted that his prior experience
would have made him incapable of rendering impartial judgment, and if you've
ever had a criminal trial where a cop with twenty years on the force is on the prospective
panel and swears he could be fair and impartial, you know what that's
like. Still, Burton could come in handy, such as in a case where a juror claims
that he wasn't a victim of a crime like the one your client's charged with, and
it turns out he was. An affirmative
false response, rather than a simple failure to respond, is probably
necessary.
In State
v. Vanzandt, the trial court issued an order sealing defendant's
records after he was acquitted of drug trafficking, then granted the State's motion
to unseal them three months later in order to prosecute the defendant for
retaliating against one of the witnesses in his trial. The defendant argued that nothing gave the
court the power to unseal the records, but the 1st District holds that was
within the court's supervisory power over its own records. It's a little bit of a stretch, but it's the
right result; the court notes that the judge didn't issue a blanket order
unsealing the records, but limited it to use in the retaliation trial.
An interesting result in the 2nd District's decision in State
v. Howard. The parties had
arrived at a plea deal, but the judge rejected it. The State conceded that the judge hadn't
given an explanation of why he did that, but the panel disagrees, finding that
the judge's statement at sentencing that he didn't believe the sentence under
the agreement was adequate was sufficient, if belated. I've got an appeal on this issue pending -- the
judge nixed a plea to abduction, a third degree felony where the maximum
penalty was three years, and the defendant was instead convicted of child rape,
with a 25-to-life sentence -- and law's pretty clear that a judge does have the
discretion to reject a plea deal if he feels it's too lenient. Stay tuned on mine.
Time to get a law
clerk. In State
v. Maney, the 3rd District reverses the denial of a motion to withdraw
a plea, finding that the defendant may have chosen to go to trial on his
domestic violence charge if he'd been correctly informed that the maximum
sentence was three years, not the five the judge told him. The fact that the judge gave him a four-year
sentence probably didn't help.
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