Death Penalty Conviction Axed, New Trial Ordered Due to Judge's Bias Against Defense Counsel
In what the Ohio Supreme Court describes in a slip opinion (PDF) today as a “highly extraordinary” case, it has vacated a death penalty conviction and ordered a new murder trial because of the trial judge’s bias against defense counsel.
As Judge Douglas Rastatter of the Clark County Court of Common Pleas himself admitted, there was “a long-standing personal revulsion of the court, dating back to when this judge was an assistant prosecuting attorney.” Plus, his bias against attorneys Richard Mayhall and John Butz was also repeatedly demonstrated in his comments and rulings during the trial, according to the opinion and a Springfield News-Sun article.
And, in a move that apparently worried and distracted the defense lawyers during trial, the judge also threatened to hold them in contempt concerning the manner in which they had handled the case, but then refused repeated requests to address the contempt issue immediately and resolve it before the murder trial moved forward.
(The lawyers were eventually fined $2,000 for allegedly manipulating the judge into a position in which they could ask him to recuse himself, although the opinion indicates that the supreme court saw little or no merit to this claim by Rastatter. However, the contempt citation eventually was vacated and the matter transferred to another judge for a new hearing.)
Because the judge’s antagonism to the two lawyers was obvious to the defendant in the capital case, Jason Dean, he asked either for new lawyers or to represent himself, the opinion recounts. Dean explained that he was doing so “under duress” because he didn’t feel his lawyers could or would defend him aggressively under the circumstances.
Citing the fact that Dean’s decision to represent himself wasn’t entirely voluntary, Rastatter refused to let him do so.
But this violated the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel, by creating an “impossible conflict” in which “Dean invoked his right to self-representation because he was caught in the middle of a dispute between the judge and his counsel in a case in which his very life was literally at stake,” the Ohio Supreme Court held today.
