Court Opinion

ID: 9475404
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:26:40.703024+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:42.442763
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Insofar as the judgment of the court affirms the district court’s denial of habeas relief as to the assault convictions, I concur; insofar as it sustains the collateral attack on petitioner Hoover’s conviction for resisting arrest, I respectfully dissent.
Three Ohio appellate court judges, a United States magistrate, a United States district judge and three United States circuit judges, having examined the record of the criminal case in the Garfield Heights Municipal Court, have concluded that Mr. Hoover’s arrest was in compliance with Ohio law. I see no reason to suppose that a Garfield Heights jury would have concluded otherwise had it been told, as it should have been, that a lawful arrest is one of the elements of the offense of resisting arrest.
The activities in which Mr. Hoover was engaged between four and five o’clock on the morning in question included (a) breaking a number of windows in the building where he and his girlfriend shared an apartment, (b) knocking over the furniture in the apartment, (c) “pushing” the girlfriend in the course of a protracted and raucous nocturnal argument, and (d) fighting with the uniformed policemen who responded to telephone complaints about the disturbance. These facts were undisputed. It was also undisputed that Mr. Hoover, caught literally redhanded (thanks to a shard from one of the windows he had broken) on a staircase outside the apartment, was arrested without a warrant and without having been told the cause of his arrest.
It was the contention of Mr. Hoover’s counsel that the fact the policemen had no warrant and the fact they failed to inform Mr. Hoover of the cause of his arrest made the arrest unlawful. The facts were undisputed, but the legal contention was simply *180wrong; the Ohio Court of Appeals so held, and the Ohio Supreme Court declined to overturn that holding. If the jury had been properly instructed, therefore, it would have been told not only that a lawful arrest is one of the elements of the crime of resisting arrest, but that when a person engages in conduct such as that in which Mr. Hoover was indisputably engaged it is lawful for the police to arrest him without a warrant and without explicitly stating the cause of the arrest.
Under these circumstances, it seems to me that the lawfulness of the arrest is a “technical” question within the meaning of that term as used in Glenn v. Dallman, 686 F.2d 418, 421 n. 2 (6th Cir.1982). Glenn v. Dallman teaches that it is plain error, of constitutional magnitude, for a state trial court not to instruct the jury on any but “technical” or “procedural” elements of the crime for which a defendant is being tried; but this court has never adopted a per se rule under which state court convictions would become vulnerable to collateral attack for failure to instruct on “technical” elements as well.
Glenn v. Dallman involved a state trial for aggravated burglary. One of the elements of that crime was that the burglarized house had to be “occupied” in the sense that someone was “present or likely to be present” at the time of the crime. It was admitted that no one was “present,” and this court held that the jury should have been permitted to determine, under proper instructions, whether anyone was “likely to be present.”
Whether anyone is “likely to be present” in a particular place at a particular time is not a technical question of law, but a pure question of fact. There are many situations, of course, in which the lawfulness of an arrest will depend on the resolution of disputed questions of fact, but this is not such a case; in the context of this particular case, therefore, the “lawfulness” element strikes me as a technical question on which the potential contribution of the jury would be minimal.
Taken as a whole, the jury instructions delivered by the Garfield Heights Municipal Court were eminently fair to Mr. Hoover. If the jury had been disposed to acquit him, it had ample room for doing so, under the instructions it received, whatever the technicalities of the case might have been. Mr. Hoover was not given a perfect trial, but he was given a trial that was fundamentally fair, that was conducted before an impartial judge and jury, and in which his able counsel had every opportunity to elicit all favorable facts. On appeal of the conviction, a panel of distinguished Ohio jurists carefully examined every claim of error and decided that the instructional error which admittedly occurred was harmless. The instructional error addressed in Rose v. Clark, 478 U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 3101, 92 L.Ed.2d 460 (1986) — allowing the element of malice to be presumed in a trial for murder — strikes me as fraught with more peril for the defendant than the technical mistake committed by the Garfield Heights Municipal Court. The United States Supreme Court having held that the application of harmless error analysis was mandatory in Rose v. Clark, I would have affirmed the denial of habeas relief as to both of Mr. Hoover’s convictions.