A wonderful victory from the Ohio Supreme Court for criminal justice rights and fair trials over the holiday break.

A better criminal justice system is coming to Ohio.

The Ohio Supreme Court recently approved new rules governing pretrial procedures that will help ensure those convicted of crimes are truly guilty, according to Thomas Moyer, chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.

The amendment to Rule 16 of the Ohio Rules of Criminal Procedure will require greater sharing of evidence between prosecutors and defense attorneys before trial.

The Dispatch discusses why it’s important the 9/11 detainees are being tried in a criminal court in New York.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that five Guantanamo Bay detainees who are charged with plotting the 9/11 terrorism attacks will have their day in court in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, blocks from where 2,751 people perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Critics, from everyday people to Republican lawmakers, have come up with all sorts of reasons not to allow this civilian trial to be conducted in New York City: It will pose too much of a safety risk, both for the site and for the judge and jurors. It will give terrorist boss Khalid Sheik Mohammed a platform to spew his anti-American rhetoric. The trial will turn into an indictment of the Bush administration and its terror-fighting tactics.

And the worst claim of all: There’s no way that these men will get a fair trial in New York. One group says they’re sure to be convicted, no matter how poor the case against them, while another group claims Mohammed and his cohorts are certain to go free on some legal technicality.

Have Americans really become so craven after 9/11? Has their distrust in the legal system become insurmountable?

The ACLU of Ohio and several other advocates appeared before the Ohio Supreme Court to challenge the Adam Walsh Act, which retroactively reclassified many low level offenders. The ACLU argued this violates due process and also diverts needed resources away from targetting sex offenders who are more likely to reoffend.

Thousands of registered sex offenders would be subject to less-stringent reporting requirements if defense lawyers succeed in challenging parts of a 2007 state law intended to crack down on sexual criminals.

The attorneys told the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday that the get-tough law was applied illegally to more than 26,000 sex offenders who were sentenced before it took effect.

In addition, the lawyers said, the measure penalizes people who commit sex offenses before they turn 18 by requiring them to continue to register as sex offenders well into adulthood.

The state’s highest court heard four cases yesterday challenging Senate Bill 10, which created a new system for classifying sex offenders based more on the severity of the crime than the likelihood of committing future offenses.

More than half of the offenders were placed in the most-serious category — sexual predators — who are required to register every 90 days for life.

Jeffrey M. Gamso, a Toledo lawyer who argued one of the cases, said the law had more to do with securing federal funding under the Adam Walsh Act than protecting Ohioans.

“Is the sheriff really keeping tabs on all those people?” Gamso asked in an interview. “We know that some people will re-offend, and we want to be able to target those people.

“You want to find the needle in the haystack, and what this does is build a bigger haystack.”

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court categorically forbidding schools from doing so, a school in Iowa strip searched a group of students because a sum of money went missing.

School’s in! September’s here; pencils are sharpened, apples are polished, and — in one Iowa town where administrators’ summer reading list clearly did not include Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding — female students are strip-searched on suspicion of theft.

The Des Moines Register reported over the weekend that on Aug. 21, the third day of school, a student at Atlantic High reported $100 missing from her purse. Five girls who were somehow deemed persons of interest in the case were asked to strip in front of a female counselor and their accuser (!?). (No boys were involved because apparently none were around when the theft was believed to have occurred.) Lawyers (yuh!) for the girls’ families told the Register that (paraphrase) each girl stripped in varying degrees. One 15-year-old “was asked to remove all of her clothing including her undergarments.” Another asked if she could lift up her bra and was told that wasn’t good enough. One was searched twice. At least two were permitted not to remove their underwear because it was more revealing than the others’ and therefore an unlikely hiding place. [End of repellent soft-core juvie prison scene]

Students, have you been strip-searched at school? Tell us about it.

ACLU Staff Counsel Carrie Davis discusses some of the problems with neighborhood watch groups and how they can sometimes unintentionally cause others to unfairly be subject to police scrutiny.

Cruise down the tree-lined streets of the Old Oaks neighborhood on a summer evening and know this: Someone is watching you.

It might be Richard Vickers, who records your license plate number in a notebook as he retrieves gun shell casings from the sidewalk while out on his nightly walk. Or it might be Doug Motz, who alerts via text message: “Watch out for the green van lurking in the alley.”

[…]

Carrie Davis, staff council for the American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio, says block watch members who aren’t trained by police should be cautious of overstepping legal boundaries.

“You have a right to observe what’s going on in the street, but that doesn’t give you a right to go peer in your neighbor’s window,” Davis says.

A great victory for ensuring that the guilty are sentenced, rather than those who may be innocent.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution in September will get a chance to convince a judge that information discovered after his conviction could have exonerated him.

Romell Broom, 53, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton. Tryna, a ninth-grader at Shaw High School in East Cleveland, had been walking home with friends from a Friday night football game when she was abducted at knife point and forced into his car.

The 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that 165 pages of records from the East Cleveland Police Department can be presented to the original trial court as possible grounds for a new trial.

ACLU of Ohio Associate Director Gary Daniels discusses the problems that arise when a court interpreter is not competant.

A Spanish-language interpreter for Franklin County Municipal Court was fired last month because he couldn’t interpret legal terms, possibly jeopardizing the constitutional rights of thousands.

[…]

“The fact that it doesn’t happen all the time is of no comfort to the person it did happen to and who is now in jail,” said Daniels. Defendants should understand exactly what is said in court, he added.

They could appeal their cases based on Bustos’ involvement, but they would need proof that the interpreting was inaccurate, said Jack R. Kullman Jr., Franklin County Court of Appeals administrator.

That might not be easy, he said. Court reporters record only what is said in English, and interpreters speak quietly to participants to avoid disturbing the proceedings.