Results matching “speedy trial delay”
Supreme Court Recap - 2010 Term
I've done a recap of the Supreme Court decisions at the end of term for the past several years, and here's the one for the 2010 term, focusing on criminal and civil liberties issues, and giving a brief summary of each decision. I'm also doing something different this time; instead of the link to the case taking you to the opinion, it will take you to the SCOTUSBLOG web page for the case, where you can access briefs, lower court opinions, and commentary about the case. You can also access the actual opinion through the web page. I'll also include a link to anything I wrote about the case, either the oral argument or when the decision was handed down.
You can bookmark this post, or you can find it by typing "recap 2010″ in the search box at the upper right corner.
Case Update
The opinions start to spill out of Washington, with most being exercises in statutory construction. Fowler v. US involves the state of mind required for conviction of the Federal witness tampering statute, which makes it a crime to "to kill another person, with intent to. . . prevent the communication by any person to a [Federal] law enforcement officer" of "information relating to the . . . possible commission of a Federal offense." Fowler killed a local police officer who discovered him preparing to rob a bank, and the 11th Circuit upheld his conviction, holding that the government needed only to show that it was "possible" that the police officer would have tipped off Federal authorities. Not so, says the Court in a 7-2 decision; the statute requires that there be a "reasonable likelihood" that a Federal official would have received the information.
In US v. Tinklenberg, the subject was a provision of the Speedy Trial statute which excludes "delay resulting from any pretrial motion." Ohio has a similar provision, and our court has interpreted that to mean that any motion filed by the defendant tolls the time. I've argued that's wrong, because it reads the "delay resulting" part out of the statute, but SCOTUS doesn't think any more of that argument than the Columbus Gang have, rejecting that interpretation in an 8-0 decision.
The two big decisions, though, were Brown v. Plata, which we'll talk about on Friday, and Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting. The latter involved an Arizona ordinance which suspended or revoked the business licenses of Arizona employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. The statute, like the more recent Arizona law allowing police officers to question people they stop about their immigration status, involves the issue of to what extent state laws are pre-empted by Federal laws on immigration, a matter traditionally reserved for the Federal government. Whiting holds that the state law does not conflict with Federal law, and is thus not pre-empted. The decision is of limited utility in gauging whether the Court will uphold the recent law, because that involves issues of discrimination as well.
Nothing happening in Columbus, so let's head over the courts of appeals...
War Stories V
I've commented before that much of the defense bar's protestation of the denial of their clients' right to speedy trial is so much bluster. Unless the defendant is in jail, he almost invariably benefits from delay: witnesses die, move, or forget, and that makes it harder to prove the case against him. There's one problem with that analysis: delay also gives him more time to screw up.
Leo Durocher was right
I've commented before that much of the defense bar's protestation of the denial of their clients' right to speedy trial is so much bluster. Unless the defendant is in jail, he almost invariably benefits from delay: witnesses die, move, or forget, and that makes it harder to prove the case against him. There's one problem with that analysis: delay also gives him more time to screw up.
What's Up in the 8th
How rare is it for a criminal case to be dismissed for a speedy trial violation? According to the 2007 Ohio Court Report (the latest one available on the Supreme Court website), of 99,779 criminal cases disposed of that year, only 84 -- 8/100ths of a percent -- were dismissed for that reason. So it's somewhat surprising that the 8th would find such a violation for the second time in two months, and for the same reason.
Case Update
Despite the fact I write a blog, I'm pretty much an idiot savant when it comes to technology; I've never even sent a text message. Jeff Quon, a member of the SWAT team of Ontario, California, can't make that claim: during a single month, he sent 456 of them over his department-issued pager. And that was just during work hours. Unfortunately, about 400 of them were non-work related, and some were sexually explicit. He was disciplined for this, and he in turn filed suit against the city for violating his privacy rights by looking at the messages.
The extent of an employees' privacy rights, in the age where everybody at work has a computer and an email account, is one of the hot new legal topics: exactly what reasonable expectation of privacy does an employee have? This is of much greater import in government-employee situations, because there the 4th Amendment applies. Unfortunately, in Quon v. City of Ontario, the US Supreme Court last week dodged that issue entirely, stating that regardless of what Quon's expectations should have been, the fact that the search was "motivated by a legitimate work-related purpose" saved it.
Stop the Beach v. Florida involved another big issue. Over the past several decades, conservatives have argued for a more expansive reading of the Constitution's "takings" clause: that it does not require compensation just for property seized under eminent domain, but for any government action that substantially reduces the value of the property (e.g., the government's declaring that a portion of your property is wetlands, and off-limits to development). The obvious result this would have in environmental law had many concerned about the outcome here, which involved a suit by condo owners against a Florida action which would have created a new beach and thereby effectively converted the properties from oceanfront to oceanview. Again, the Court dodges that issue, instead engaging in a lengthy discussion of littoral rights. Well, I assume it was lengthy; I stopped reading it the second time "littoral rights" was mentioned. If you're still looking to quench your thirst for knowledge, this article and this one discuss the issue in more detail than I can muster.
As for the output from Columbus, I covered the major decision on Friday, so let's get to the courts of appeals...
Justice delayed
Back when I started practicing in 1975, there were 34 judges on the Common Pleas bench here in Cuyahoga County, and they handled about 2500 criminal cases a year. Now, we have the same number of judges, but they handle ten times as many criminal cases.
So here's the way it works. Let's say you talk to the prosecutor, and the case can't be pled out. The two of you will walk back to the bailiff, PDA's in hand, and the bailiff will look through the judge's calendar -- a loose-leaf binder with a lined page for each day -- and after the appropriate consulation will write down your case for trial on a particular date, sometimes a few weeks away, sometimes a few months.
And then, a few weeks or a few months later, you'll go over for trial, and find that (a) one of the four or five other cases scheduled for trial that day will be going forward instead, or (b) the judge is already in a trial on another case that started a day or two before yours. So you'll talk to the bailiff and get another date at some time in the future -- anywhere from two to six weeks later -- and the bailiff will put together a journal entry saying that your trial had to be continued because the court was already engaged in another matter, and the judge will sign it, and that will be that.
After the 8th District's decision last week in State v. Pirkel, that could change.
Yes, Virginia...
...there is a speedy trial statute, and like Christmas, a reversal for violation of it comes but once a year. Or so it seems. Well, last week was the time of the season up here by the lake. In State v. Byrd, the 8th District addressed a plethora of speedy trial issue, among them...
Case Update
Nothing out of DC, but the Gang of Seven in Columbus more than makes up for it, with a half-dozen decisions, all of them notable. In State v. Diar, where the court affirmed the conviction of a woman who killed her 4-year-old child, but vacated the death sentence because the jury had been instructed that all twelve had to agree on life imprisonment or death. It's been the law since 1996 that a single juror's objection to a death sentence takes that penalty off the table.
Several civil decisions of note. In Cheap Escape Co. v. Haddox, the court voids a forum selection clause which provided that any action had to be brought in the Franklin County Municipal Court, despite the fact that all of the dealings occurred in Summit County. The court held that the jurisdiction of municipal courts is limited to actions which have a territorial connection to the court. Selection clauses for common pleas courts are unaffected, since their jurisdiction isn't limited in that fashion.
In Byrd v. Knuckles, the court says that child support arrearages can be modified by agreement of the parties, and in Grundy v. Dillon, it confronts the situation of a juror who withheld information during voir dire. The court decides that in order to obtain a new trial on that basis, the movant has to show that an accurate response would have provided a basis for challenging the juror for cause. Good luck with that.
Two other decisions, one civil and one criminal, merit more extensive treatment, as we say in the law biz, and I'll provide that on Wednesday. As for the courts of appeals...
What's Up in the 8th
Twenty-four cases last week, and at least a partial reversal in one-third of them.
I've chided the 8th before for its mishandling of Crawford and hearsay, but all is forgiven: in State v. Rufus, the court nails it. Short version: Husband and wife get into a fight, wife claims husband started it, policeman says he interviewed couple's 8-year-old child and child backs up mom's story. The court reviews Crawford and its progeny, noting that whether the 8-year-old's statement is testimonial hinges on whether the police were responding to an emergency at that point, or whether the interrogation was instead intended to "prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution." The court correctly concludes that it's the latter, and reverses.
What's especially heartening is that the case was tried to the judge, and the court didn't blow off the error by saying that it presumed the judge considered only admissible evidence. The court took the time to analyze what the judge had said in his verdict, and determined that the child's statement had played a major role in the verdict.
The defendant is prosecuted for welfare fraud in 1993, enters the diversion program, is kicked out in 1999 for failure to make payments, the state doesn't get around to reinstating the charge until 2006, and it takes them another year before they bother to serve her with a capias. A delay of that length violates the constitutional right to speedy trial, says the court in State v. Barnes.
In State v. Cooper, the defendant is charged with telephone harassment, which is "a misdemeanor of the first degree on a first offense and a felony of the fifth degree on each subsequent offense." The state argues that because Cooper "repeatedly violated the statute over a period of months, that is sufficient for the felony telecommunications harassment conviction." There's a whole bunch of cases saying that in such situations there has to be a prior conviction, not just a prior offense, so that's the end of that.
Our old friend allied offenses pops up in State v. Mosley. Mosley and his girlfriend get into an argument while she's ironing; he grabs and shakes her, she drops the iron and trips over it, the two fall to the ground. He holds her down, despite her protests; "within seconds," the girlfriend's mother and son pull him off of her. The court concludes that's enough to constitute both domestic violence and kidnapping. The court notes that the two crimes are dissimilar -- each contains proof that the other does not -- but to its credit goes beyond that and moves to the issue of whether the legislature intended to impose separate penalties because of the disparate harms resulting from the crimes. I'm not sure that holding a person down for a few seconds constitutes a sufficiently disparate harm to warrant penalties for both, but the opinion's thoughtful and well-written, and focuses on the correct issue, so on an appellate level, that probably counts for as much as a correct result.
And finally, a civil case. In Asaodorian v. Demirjian, the trial court grants summary judgment in a breach of contract case, saying that the contract was oral and the 6-year statute had run. The 15-year statute hadn't, though, and the 8th reverses, holding that even if there's no written contract as such, letters from the party who's alleged to have breached the contract can suffice if they include all the essential terms of the agreement.