State v. Jackson ( 2016 )

[Cite as State v. Jackson, 2016-Ohio-5196.]
IN THE COURT OF APPEALS
FIRST APPELLATE DISTRICT OF OHIO
HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO
STATE OF OHIO, : APPEAL NOS. C-150657
C-150658
Plaintiff-Appellant, : C-150659
C-150660
vs. : TRIAL NOS. 11CRB-17976
11CRB-17973
MARY JACKSON, : 11CRB-22815-A
11CRB-22815-B
Defendant-Appellee. :
O P I N I O N.
Criminal Appeals From: Hamilton County Municipal Court
Judgments Appealed From Are: Affirmed
Date of Judgment Entry on Appeal: August 3, 2016
Paula Boggs Muething, City Solicitor, Natalia Harris, City Prosecutor, and
Jonathan Rengering, Assistant Prosecutor, for Plaintiff-Appellant,
Raymond Faller, Hamilton County Public Defender, and David Hoffmann, Assistant
Public Defender, for Defendant-Appellee.
OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
D E W INE , Judge.
{¶1} These are appeals from a trial court’s dismissal of criminal charges on
speedy-trial grounds. There was a four-year delay between the issuance of warrants and
the defendant’s arrest. For more than a third of the time, the defendant was
incarcerated in Ohio. Because the state failed to exercise reasonable diligence to bring
the defendant to trial, we must presume that she was prejudiced by the lengthy delay.
Thus, we uphold the trial court's dismissal of the charges.
I. Background
{¶2} In June and July, 2011, warrants were issued for Mary Jackson’s arrest.
The state alleged that she had written bad checks to two businesses and failed to return a
chainsaw she had rented from one of the businesses. It wasn’t until nearly four years
later that Jackson was arrested on the charges. Following her arrest, she filed a motion
to dismiss, arguing that prosecution was barred by the statute of limitations and on
speedy-trial grounds.
{¶3} During the hearing on the motion, Detective Charles Zopfi recounted his
efforts to find Jackson. Detective Zopfi said that he had looked for Jackson at the
Bellevue, Kentucky address that was listed on the checks she had written and on a rental
agreement. When he didn’t find Jackson at the address, he asked around the
neighborhood with no success. Detective Zopfi was unable to come up with a different
address for Jackson: a query put to the LEADS system at the Regional Crime
Information Center returned the same Bellevue, Kentucky address. And several calls to
the phone number Jackson had provided yielded no results. Later, Detective Zopfi
asked Bellevue police officers to periodically check the address and apprehend Jackson if
possible.
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{¶4} After about a month of searching for Jackson, Detective Zopfi turned the
matter over to the warrants section in his district. According to Detective Zopfi, the
warrants section “take[s] it from there” and “send[s] out cards to any last known
addresses or any address that [it] might come up with in the future.” Detective Zopfi
further explained that the warrant officers “run queries routinely to see if [the] person
has been recently picked up * * * and to see if there’s any new addresses listed
anywhere.” As part of their job, warrant officers also send cards to the last known
address to inform the person about the outstanding warrants. Detective Zopfi had no
other involvement with the case until Jackson was stopped on June 29, 2015, for a
traffic violation and arrested for the open warrants.
{¶5} For her part, Ms. Jackson testified that she had not lived at the
Bellevue, Kentucky address listed on her checks since March 2011. For most of 2011,
Ms. Jackson lived in a hotel in Florence, Kentucky, in friends’ homes or in her car. In
2012, she began living at her grandfather’s house at another address in Bellevue. Ms.
Jackson was arrested in Butler County, Ohio, on May 21, 2012, on unrelated charges.
She was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison. For those 18
months, Ms. Jackson was incarcerated in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in
Marysville, Ohio and the Dayton Correctional Institute. When she got out of prison
on October 12, 2013, she returned to Bellevue, Kentucky.
{¶6} At the conclusion of the hearing, the trial court determined that
Jackson’s prosecution was not barred by the statute of limitations but that the state
had violated her constitutional speedy-trial rights. The court noted the lack of
reasonable diligence on the state’s part: “In this case there was an effort after the
warrant but that effort stopped within the 28 or 30 days that [Detective Zopfi]
aggressively tried to find her. And then the state did nothing. Even when she was
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within its borders, nothing would occur.” Thus, the court dismissed the charges
against Jackson.
II. Jackson’s Speedy-Trial Rights were Violated
{¶7} The state contends that the trial court erred when it dismissed the
charges on speedy-trial grounds. The gist of its argument is that because it acted
with reasonable diligence in pursuing the charges against Jackson, the state should
not be penalized for the four-year delay. Ms. Jackson responds that the four-year
delay was “presumptively prejudicial” and violated her rights.
{¶8} Our review of the trial court’s decision involves mixed questions of fact
and law. “We give due weight to the inferences drawn from the facts found by the
trial court as long as they are supported by competent, credible evidence. With
respect to the trial court’s conclusions of law, we employ a de novo standard of
review, to determine whether the facts satisfy the applicable legal standard.” State v.
Rice, 1st Dist. Hamilton No. C-150191, 2015-Ohio-5481, ¶ 15, citing State v. Terrell,
1st Dist. Hamilton No. C-020194, 2003-Ohio-3044.
{¶9} The United States Supreme Court has instructed that determining
whether a defendant’s speedy-trial rights have been violated requires a flexible
approach considering four factors: the length of the delay, the reason for the delay,
the defendant’s assertion of her speedy-trial rights and the resulting prejudice to the
defendant from the delay. Barker v. Wingo, 407 U.S. 514, 530, 92 S. Ct. 2182, 33
L. Ed. 2d 101 (1972).
{¶10} The first factor—the length of the delay—is a threshold inquiry.
“Simply to trigger a speedy trial analysis, an accused must allege that the interval
between accusation and trial has crossed the threshold dividing ordinary from
‘presumptively prejudicial’ delay[.]” Doggett v. United States, 505 U.S. 647, 651-
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
652, 112 S. Ct. 2686, 120 L. Ed. 2d 520 (1992). The United States Supreme Court
clarified what is meant by “presumptive prejudice” when considering the first factor:
[A]s the term is used in this threshold context, ‘presumptive prejudice’
does not necessarily indicate a statistical probability of prejudice; it
simply marks the point at which courts deem the delay unreasonable
enough to trigger the Barker enquiry.
Id. at 652, fn. 1. In Doggett, the court indicated that the threshold for inquiry into
the other factors was somewhere around one year. Id. This court has concluded that
a nine-month delay prompts further inquiry. State v. Sears, 166 Ohio App. 3d 166,
2005-Ohio-5963, 849 N.E.2d 1060, ¶ 12 (1st Dist.). Thus, the four-year delay in this
case requires consideration of the remaining factors.
{¶11} The second factor—the reason for the delay—allocates fault for the
delay. It is the state’s burden to explain the reason for the delay:
The prosecutor and the court have an ‘affirmative constitutional
obligation’ to try the defendant in a timely manner. This
‘constitutional duty’ is not satisfied unless ‘a diligent good faith effort’
has been made to try the defendant promptly. On appeal, the
prosecution has the burden of explaining the cause for pre-trial delay.
Unexplained delay is weighed against the prosecution.
(Citations omitted.) Redd v. Sowders, 809 F.2d 1266, 1269 (6th Cir.1987). The state
maintains that because it acted with reasonable diligence in pursuing the charges, it
should not be faulted for the delay.
{¶12} We are not convinced that the state’s actions in pursuing the charges
were reasonably diligent. True, the court found that Detective Zopfi’s efforts in the
first month after issuance of the warrants were reasonably diligent. That diligence
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
was sufficient to end the inquiry into the statute-of-limitations claim: A case is
considered commenced for purposes of the statute of limitations upon issuance of
the warrants so long as the state has been reasonably diligent in executing the
warrants. See R.C. 2901.13(F). Beyond Detective Zopfi’s actions in the month after
the warrants were issued, however, the court found that there was no effort on the
part of the state.
{¶13} The state counters that it acted with reasonable diligence by turning
the warrants over to the warrant officers after its initial efforts were unsuccessful. In
considering a statutory speedy-rights challenge, the Twelfth Appellate District held
that merely entering a warrant into a database and sending a warrant to a
defendant’s county of residence does not constitute reasonable diligence under R.C.
2945.72. See State v. Baker, 12th Dist. Fayette No. CA2008-03-008, 2009-Ohio-
674, ¶ 17-19. See also State v. Hayman, 3d Dist. Seneca No. 13-09-22, 2010-Ohio-
1264. The same goes here. There was no evidence that the state did anything to
locate Ms. Jackson after the warrant officers took over. Notably, the state doesn’t
explain how, if its efforts were diligent, it was unaware that Jackson spent 18 months
of the delay in Ohio correctional facilities. Surely had the “routine” queries discussed
by Detective Zopfi actually been undertaken, the state would have discovered that
Jackson was sitting in its prisons. We agree with the trial court that, save for the one
month following the issuance of the warrants, the state was not reasonably diligent in
pursuing the charges against Jackson. The second factor weighs against the state.
{¶14} The third factor—assertion of speedy-trial rights—does not strongly
factor into this case. If a defendant sits on his speedy-trial rights, the factor weighs
against the defendant. See Barker, 407 U.S. at 535-536, 92 S. Ct. 2182, 33 L. Ed. 2d
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101. But that was not the situation here. Jackson promptly asserted her speedy-trial
rights upon her arrest.
{¶15} The Barker analysis culminates in a determination of whether the
delay considered in the preceding three factors resulted in prejudice to the
defendant. In Barker, the court analyzed prejudice in terms of the interests that
were protected by speedy-trial rights. The court identified three interests: (1) the
prevention of oppressive pretrial incarceration; (2) the minimization of the accused’s
anxiety and concern; and (3) the limitation of impairment of the accused’s defense.
Id. at 532. Neither the first nor second identified interest is at issue here: Ms.
Jackson was not incarcerated for a protracted time on her charges, and she suffered
no anxiety over the charges about which she had been unaware. The question boils
down to whether her defense was impaired.
{¶16} “[I]mpairment of one’s defense is the most difficult form of speedy
trial prejudice to prove because time’s erosion of exculpatory evidence and testimony
‘can rarely be shown.’ ” Doggett, 505 U.S. at 655, 112 S. Ct. 2686, 120 L. Ed. 2d 520.
Ms. Jackson contends that any delay beyond the nine-month threshold set by Sears
was prejudicial unless the state proved otherwise. But such a rule would eliminate
consideration of the other factors. Instead, we approach the prejudice element as
done in the closely analogous case Doggett.
{¶17} In Doggett, there was an eight-and-one-half-year delay between the
defendant’s indictment and arrest, and during six of those years, the government was
“negligent” in bringing the defendant to trial. The court explained the impact of the
long delay:
[W]e generally have to recognize that excessive delay presumptively
compromises the reliability of a trial in ways that neither party can
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
prove or, for that matter, identify. While such presumptive prejudice
cannot alone carry a Sixth Amendment [speedy-trial] claim without
regard to the other Barker criteria, it is part of the mix of relevant
facts, and its importance increases with the length of the delay.
(Citation omitted.) Id. at 655-656.
{¶18} The question becomes at what point prejudice to the defendant is
presumed so that she is relieved of showing actual prejudice to her defense. The
Doggett court answered the question by focusing on the culpability of the state in
failing to bring the defendant to trial:
Although negligence is obviously to be weighed more lightly than a
deliberate intent to harm the accused’s defense, it still falls on the
wrong side of the divide between acceptable and unacceptable reasons
for delaying a criminal prosecution once it has begun. And such is the
nature of the prejudice presumed that the weight we assign to official
negligence compounds over time as the presumption of evidentiary
prejudice grows. Thus, our toleration of such negligence varies
inversely with its protractedness.
Id. at 657.
{¶19} In Doggett, the six-year portion of the delay attributable to the
government’s negligence in pursuing the defendant’s arrest was sufficient to allow
the court to presume prejudice to the defense. Because the presumptive prejudice of
the delay had not been rebutted by the government nor mitigated by any
acquiescence on the part of the defendant, the defendant was entitled to relief for
violation of his speedy-trial rights. Id. at 658. See Sears, 166 Ohio App. 3d 166,
2005-Ohio-5963, 849 N.E.2d 1060, at ¶ 16 (prejudice caused by nine-month delay
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presumed where “the state [] made an official accusation, but fail[ed] to use any
reasonable diligence to let its accusation be known to the defendant”). Compare
State v. Triplett, 78 Ohio St. 3d 566, 679 N.E.2d 290 (1997) (54-month delay not
prejudicial where defendant knew about charges against her, gave her address to
police and then refused to accept certified mail at the address).
{¶20} As in Doggett, we have a lengthy delay brought on by the state’s lack of
reasonable diligence in the pursuit of charges. We conclude that Ms. Jackson was
not required to show actual prejudice where there was a four-year delay occasioned
by the state’s lack of diligence. While she hasn’t—and likely couldn’t have—shown
actual prejudice, the length of the delay and the state’s inaction leads us to presume
that Jackson was prejudiced. The court did not err in concluding that her speedy-
trial rights had been violated. The sole assignment of error is overruled, and we
affirm the trial court’s judgments.
Judgments affirmed.
C UNNINGHAM , P.J., and M OCK , J., concur.
Please note:
The court has recorded its own entry on the date of the release of this opinion.
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