July, 2020

Subscribers to the Criminal Defense Resource Center’s online resources, found at www.sado.org, have access to more than 1,800 appellate pleadings filed by SADO Attorneys in the last five years.  The brief bank is updated regularly and is open to anyone who wants to subscribe to online access.  On our site, briefs are searchable by keyword, results can be organized by relevance or date, and the pleadings can be filtered by court of filing.  Below are some of the issues presented in briefs added to our brief bank in the last few weeks. For confidentiality purposes, names of clients and witnesses have been removed.

BB 321030:  Defendant was denied his due process rights to a fair trial by the presentation of expert testimony that impermissibly bolstered the witnesses’ credibility. Alternatively, counsel was ineffective for failing to object to the testimony.

BB 321031:  Defendant was deprived of his right to effective assistance of counsel where his attorney unreasonably failed to conduct an investigation, present a defense, and impeach the complainant with information critical to her credibility and the resolution of the case. Moreover, defendant was deprived of his right to effective assistance of counsel as well as his fundamental right to testify in his defense due to counsel’s deficient legal advice.

BB 321037:  Defendant’s minimum term exceeds two-thirds of his maximum term and thus violates the Tanner rule.

BB 321038:  The jury instructions violated the Sixth Amendment by making a factual determination on an element of the offense. In the alternative, trial counsel violated defendant’s right to counsel by failing to object to the jury instruction.

BB 321040:  The closure of the courtroom to all members of the public except for the decedent’s grieving mother violated defendant’s right to a fundamentally fair trial, as well as a public trial. Defendant was also denied his right to the effective assistance of counsel where his attorney failed to object to the closure order.

BB 321042:  Defendant asked the trial judge to wait to try his case until the Supreme Court decided his leave  Defendant must be resentenced because the maximum possible sentence imposed was disproportionate to the offense and the offender.

BB 321046:  Defendant was deprived of his constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel when counsel failed to request that the jury be specifically instructed to not consider the prosecutor’s cross-examination of his character witness as evidence that the additional accusations were true. A new trial must be granted.

BB 321047:  Defendant is entitled to resentencing because the trial court incorrectly scored OV 19 at ten points, in violation of defendant’s rights under statutory law and constitutional due process. Alternatively, defense trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective for failing to object to the improper scoring. 

BB 321048:  Defendant is entitled to resentencing because he was deprived of his due process right to be sentenced on the basis of accurate information where OV 13 was incorrectly scored at 50 points and where the prosecutor argued facts not in the record to support the OV scoring and an upward departure.

by John Zevalking
Associate Editor