Case Update
RC 2901.08(A) provided that a juvenile adjudication could be used to determining the offense or the sentence of a defendant. If your client has a juvenile adjudication for domestic violence, say, and gets charged with the same offense as an adult, it's a felony. Two years ago, in State v. Hand (discussed here), the Supreme Court held that was a violation of due process, since the juvenile didn't have the benefit of a jury trial.
Thus began my effort to persuade courts that you couldn't base a weapons under disability conviction on a juvenile adjudication. Made sense to me: if you couldn't penalize someone based on a juvenile adjudication, you shouldn't be able to make an offense out of one.
Well, it didn't make sense to the Ohio Supreme Court, because last week in State v. Carnes the Supreme Court flatly rejected it by a 6-1 vote.
The opinion starts by pointing out that there are several other ways one can have a disability to possess weapons other than a juvenile adjudication; being under indictment for a crime of violence or a drug offense will do the trick. But so what? RC 2901.08 also applied to adults, and that didn't prevent the court from looking at the issue of a juvenile adjudication. The opinion also points to the fact that there's a procedure for obtaining relief from a disability, and that "notably, Carnes failed to avail himself of this process." Since the issue before the court is whether Carnes had a disability in the first place, I'm not seeing the logic in arguing that Carnes' failure to remove that disability is relevant.
A couple of other points. First, the vote by justices who actually are on the Supreme Court was 3-1; there were three visiting judges. Kind of odd.
More substantively, there's a great dissent by O'Connor, in which she catalogues all the sociological evidence on brain development in juveniles. You can find this sort of thing in O'Connor's other opinions, as well as Justice Kennedy's opinions in the SCOTUS decisions on juveniles, like Roper v. Simmons (outlawing death penalty for juveniles) and Graham v. Florida (prohibiting life without parole sentences for minors). Many of us have cases involving very young defendants who are looking at doing a lot of time. Dropping a bunch of O'Connor's and Kennedy's language into a sentencing memorandum can't hurt.
Your client spent nine months in jail before pleading out to four felonies, for which he got four years and eleven months, plus four years in firearm specifications. Here's a fun quiz: when is he eligible for judicial release?
The mandatory sentences don't count toward judicial release. For a sentence of four years and eleven months, he can file after six months. (The judge must have given some thought to judicial release: a sentence of five years flat requires a defendant to wait four years before filing for judicial release.) But does the jail-time credit count toward the firearms specs? If it does, then your client gets nine months off the mandatory time, meaning he only has to do three years and three months on that, plus another six months; in short, he can file after doing three years and nine months. If it doesn't, he has to wait the entire four years before he can file. (There's no question that the nine months counts toward the underlying offense; in this scenario, he can file as soon as he's finished serving the gun specs.)
That's the situation of the defendant in State v. Moore, and if you guessed Moore loses, you win. Again, though, the case has its quirks. The 6th District decided to address the constitutional aspect of the case -- equal protection -- although that hadn't been raised or briefed by the parties. Three justices decide that it's adequately briefed in the Supreme Court, so they can go ahead and decide it. Fischer and O'Connor concur only in judgment, finding that the court of appeals shouldn't have addressed the issue of constitutionality, and so the court shouldn't have done so, either. O'Donnell concurs only in judgment, too, but that still leaves four justices in the majority. Well, three; the fourth vote was provided by a visiting judge.
The defendant in the 1st District's decision in State v. Hill contends that the trial court erred in admitting into evidence the body camera tapes, which "suggested his involvement in another criminal offense and referenced his lengthy criminal history." The tapes probably would have been inadmissible, except for one thing: Hill was the one who introduced them at trial.
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