Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission properly held that city ordinance was unreasonable and void because it threatened to impose unreasonable expenses on an energy company, which would in turn impact all of the energy company’s customers throughout Indiana.
C. Goff
Lane v. State, No. 24S-CR-150, __N.E.3d __ (Ind., May 2, 2024).
Sentencing courts should consider the full range of available options, including community-based rehabilitation programs, for defendants who commit low-level offenses but pose little continuing danger to others. However, to ensure public safety, courts should consider extended jail sentences for low-level offenders with a history of violence who pose a continuing threat to others. Reviewing courts will defer to a trial court’s considered assessment that a person is too dangerous to receive anything but a lengthy executed sentence.
Dunn v. State, No. 24S-CR-123, __N.E.3d __ (Ind., Apr. 10, 2024).
Courts should take great caution in using the phrase “and/or,” especially in jury instructions, because it is ambiguous and potentially imprecise. Where wording permits two contradictory interpretations, one correct and one erroneous, the jury may be misled as to the law.
G.W. v. State, No. 23S-JV-246, __N.E.3d __ (Ind., Apr. 10, 2024).
When a juvenile court fails to enter the requisite findings of fact in its dispositional order, an appellate court should neither affirm nor reverse. Instead, the proper remedy is to remand the case under Ind. App. R. 66(C)(8) while holding the appeal in abeyance.
A.W. v. State, No. 23S-JV-40, __ N.E.3d __ (Ind., March 12, 2024).
Under the second step of the double jeopardy test announced in the Indiana Supreme Court’s Wadle opinion, when assessing whether an offense is factually included, a court may examine only the facts as presented on the face of the charging instrument. Moreover, where ambiguities exist in a charging instrument about whether one offense is factually included in another, courts must construe those ambiguities in the defendant’s favor, and thus find a presumptive double jeopardy violation. In this event, the State can later rebut this presumption at the third step of the Wadle test.