Florida’s death-penalty statutory scheme, under which judge must find aggravating circumstance justifying death and jury’s sentencing recommendation of death or life without parole is only advisory, violates Sixth Amendment jury right.
Criminal
Beasley v. State, No. 49S02-1601-CR-20, ___ N.E.3d ___ (Ind. Jan. 14, 2016).
Trial court acted within its discretion under Evid. R. 804(b)(3) to admit murder victim’s hearsay statement that he shot at defendant the night before as a “statement against interest”; statement was unambiguous and had a great “tendency … to expose the declarant to civil or criminal liability,” even though declarant believed he had acted in self-defense.
Woods v. State, No. 20A03-1506-PC-688, ___ N.E.3d ___ (Ind. Ct. App. Dec. 29, 2015).
Post-conviction court erred in finding that defendant received effective assistance of trial counsel; there was no serious dispute that counsel (now deceased) had failed prior to trial to communicate a guilty-plea offer that would have reduced defendant’s sentence exposure to about half of what he actually received.
D.A. v. State, No. 48A02-1504-MI-215, ___ N.E.3d ___ (Ind. Ct. App. Dec. 31, 2015).
Trial court, having expunged defendant’s convictions, should also have granted defendant’s request to expunge the records of a civil forfeiture proceeding that arose from the same facts underlying the convictions; expungement statute was ambiguous on that point, but as a remedial statute must be liberally construed.
State v. J.S., No. 16A04-1503-MI-89, __ N.E.3d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Dec. 28, 2015).
Trial court could not prevent the Bureau of Motor Vehicles from disclosing expunged OWI conviction to Commercial Driver’s License Information System. (At issue is the expungement law effective July 1, 2013, which has since been amended.)