Another Yarbrough update
Earlier this month, I discussed here the remarkable ruling of the Ohio Supreme Court in State v. Yarbrough, 104 Ohio St.3d 1, 2004-Ohio-6087 (Dec. 1, 2004), in which a unanimous court concluded it must reverse a death sentence for the gruesome murders of two Ohio college students for lack of jurisdiction because the murders were committed in Pennsylvania. Following up, as detailed here, I posted the motion for reconsideration filed in Yarbrough at the request of Chris Muha, a Yale Law School student who is the older brother of Brian Muha, who was murdered 5 years ago by Terrell Yarbrough. A fascinating dialogue to this motion appeared in the comments and elsewhere in the blogsphere (thanks to posts by Orin Kerr and Mark Godsey and Chris Geidner and many others).
I can now report that the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday denied without opinion the motion for reconsideration in Yarbrough, although one justice, Francis Sweeney, dissented. Chris Muha has responded by requesting that I post a memo he has written in which he asserts that “what might amount to the state’s strongest argument has only recently come to light.” In this memo, which can be downloaded below, Chris contends that the Model Penal Code, from which Ohio’s criminal code is largely derived, “would give Ohio jurisdiction over the murders committed by Terrell Yarbrough.”
As before, Chris is eager for blogsphere feedback on his legal analysis. As he explained in an e-mail to me:
I would love to get feedback on [this memo], not only for my own working through of all of this, but because there’s a possibility that Nathan Herring, Yarbrough’s accomplice, will appeal his own murder convictions, in which case we might get the chance to fully litigate the arguments we made in the motion. I’ll also be honest and say that I really think the court got all of this wrong, and that I would like to see that fact recognized…. [The prior posting] seemed to generate a lot of productive discussion, which I genuinely benefitted from, and for which I’m grateful.
Chris can be reached by e-mail at cmuha@rocketmail.com. He also noted to me that he and his mother will be on the O’Reilly Factor tomorrow (Thursday night) to discuss these matters.