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.
Supreme
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.
Safeco Ins. Co. v. Blue Sky Innovation Group, Inc., No. 23S-CT-272, __ N.E.3d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Apr. 2, 2024).
Trial court properly dismissed a third-party spoliation claim when there was no special relationship between the parties to create a duty to preserve the evidence.
Cooley v. Cooley, No. 23S-DN-245, __ N.E.3d __ (Ind., March 20, 2024).
Trial courts have broad statutory authority to order a security or other guarantee, when necessary, to secure the division of property in a dissolution of marriage; the trial court properly required husband to obtain and subsidize a life insurance policy on his retirement benefits.