Prosecutor says Glouster escapee had fair trial
March 24, 2008
The Athens County Prosecutor’s office has argued that a man convicted of escaping from Glouster Police was not denied a fair trial, just because his defense attorney didn’t get to suggest to the jury that his client may never have been under arrest to begin with.
Matt Handa, 30, is now serving a six-year prison sentence, after an Athens County jury found him guilty of escape in August.
The charge stemmed from a February 2007 incident in which Handa was arrested on a warrant, then allegedly ran out of the Glouster Police department in handcuffs, got away from a pursuing officer, and hid out in a nearby residence.
In an appeal of the conviction, attorney Sarah M. Schregardus of the Ohio Public Defender’s office argued that Handa’s trial attorney, Glenn Jones, should have been given a chance to persuade a jury that Handa was never legally under arrest, because the warrant was faulty and the officer never had Handa under “control.”
She also argued that Jones should have been allowed to cross-examine the arresting officer about his claim that he stuffed the warrant into his pocket when he went chasing after Handa.
Jones suggested at the time that this claim by the officer didn’t fit with the unwrinkled condition of the warrant as produced in evidence, but the state objected to this questioning and the judge cut him off.
In a brief filed last week, Athens County assistant prosecutor Keller Blackburn argued that neither an incomplete arrest warrant nor the arresting officer’s alleged lack of physical “control” of Handa, means that Handa wasn’t really under arrest when he fled the station.
“A person is under detention as that term is used in (state law) when he is arrested and the arresting officer has established control over his person,” Blackburn wrote. “Control can be established by the surrender or submission by the person or by police exertion of control over the person.”
Though the warrant used to arrest Handa didn’t include his name, Blackburn argued that the warrant still qualified as a court order mandating his arrest. He noted, for example, that the document included Handa’s Social Security number, which the arresting officer checked.
Schregardus argued in her appeal brief that the officer’s claim about crumpling the warrant, coupled with the actual, un-wrinkled condition of the document, could have been used to impeach the officer’s credibility, and that the court should have let Jones pursue this line of questioning.
Blackburn responded that the question of why the document produced in court was not crumpled comes down to the question of whether it was a second-generation copy. This question is not relevant to the charge against Handa, Blackburn suggested, and therefore the judge was justified in closing off Jones’ cross-examination about it.
“In the instant case, the only issue is whether the warrant presented to the witness for cross-examination was a copy or a copy of a copy, which is not a properly provable proposition,” Blackburn wrote.
Schregardus also complained that while Jones was denied the chance to cross-examine the officer about the state of the warrant, the prosecutor brought up the issue of the “crumpled paper” repeatedly in his closing arguments. This was prejudicial to Handa’s case, she said.
Blackburn responded in his brief that by failing to object at the time that the prosecutor made the statements in his closing arguments, Jones waived any right to raise this issue on appeal.
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