People v. State

Last week a panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals decided Anthony Dye v. State of Indiana, affirming, by a vote of 2-1, Dye’s twenty-year sentence for Unlawful Possession of a Firearm by a Serious Violent Felon and the jury’s finding that he is a Habitual Offender, by virtue of which his sentence was enhanced by thirty years.

Dye was the “victim” in a case I’ve talked about a lot here on this blog, Tyrus Coleman v. State of Indiana. Dye’s conviction for Unlawful Possession of a Firearm by a Serious Violent Felon was based on the same tragic incident in 2007 on which Tyrus Coleman’s conviction for the Attempted Murder of Dye was based.

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Thus writes Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Breyer, in their dissenting opinion in Cavazos v. Smith, in which the majority summarily reversed a Ninth Circuit decision holding that no rational trier of fact could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty of shaking her grandchild and causing his death in 1996. As a result of the majority’s decision, the grandmother, who has been free for the last five years, will now have to return to prison.

The very fact that the presumably-rational Ninth Circuit judges found that no rational trier of fact could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt should itself demonstrate to a rational mind that no rational trier of fact could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even the majority on the SCOTUS admitted that “Doubts about whether Smith is in fact guilty are understandable.” If those doubts are understandable, they’re reasonable.

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— reversing the Indiana Court of Appeals to reinstate a criminal conviction for no good reason (as they also recently did in Barnes and Coleman).

The facts in Brenda Moore v. State were not in dispute:

The defendant had consumed two tall cans of beer at her sister’s house on the evening of December 5, 2008. A friend of the defendant’s brother asked for a ride to visit a friend. The defendant explained to him that she could not drive because she had been drinking but that he could drive her car if he had a license. The brother’s friend then drove the defendant’s car with the defendant riding as a front seat passenger. When an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Officer pulled over the car because the license plate light was not working, the officer determined that the driver did not have a valid driver’s license and that the defendant could not operate the vehicle because she was intoxicated.

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Jamison Koehler cites Ashe v. Swenson (1970) as currently his favorite U.S. Supreme Court case. In a comment on his post I wrote: “If you like Ashe, you might also like Yeager. Until recently these used to be my favorite U.S. Supreme Court cases too.”

What recently changed my mind about these cases is the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Tyrus Coleman v. State (2011), and the utter failure of these cases to do Mr. Coleman (whom I represented at trial) any good. Now when I read Yeager the only significant thing about the case seems to me to be the fact that the defendant, Mr. Yeager, was an Enron executive.

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