On Wednesday the Supreme Court issued its decision in State v. Mutter, an appeal from the Fourth District concerning whether a prior no contest plea and sentence for aggravated menacing precluded a later indictment for ethnic intimidation. The Court holds that it does.
This case appears to me to be a fairly straightforward application of the double jeopardy clause. The defendants in 2014 pleaded no contest to and were convicted of aggravated menacing under R.C. 2903.21. Aggravated menacing, generally speaking, occurs when someone knowingly causes another person to believe that the offender will cause serious bodily harm to that person or a member of that person's family.
Later that year they were indicted by a grand jury for ethnic intimidation under R.C. 2927.12. Section 2927.12 makes it a crime to violate any of several statutes "by reason of the race, color, religion, or national origin of another person or group of persons." The aggravated menacing statute under which the Mutters were convicted is on the list of predicate offenses, and thus is a lesser included offense of ethnic intimidation.
The Court framed the question simply as whether the State could lawfully charge the Mutters with a larger crime, after the Mutters were convicted of a lesser included charge. And the answer is no; the Fifth Amendment and " Article I, Section 10
of the Ohio Constitution prohibit multiple prosecutions for the same offense." In order to prove ethnic intimidation, the State necessarily had to re-prove and re-convict the Mutters of aggravated menacing, and the second prosecution was therefore prohibited by the double jeopardy clause.
Justice Sharon Kennedy authored the unanimous decision, though Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor concurred only in the judgment and without separate opinion.
Mutter is one of the quickest opinions of the 2017 term. The case was argued on February 28 and the decision issued on May 24, a span of 85 days.
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