"Courts lose file in Crown Point party case" is the headline to this story in the Gary Post-Tribune. It begins:
"Experts question scientific sense of substance law" is the headline to this story in the South Bend Tribune. Some quotes:
CROWN POINT — The case of a special education teacher at Crown Point High School who was charged in March with a holding a keg party for minors seems to have vanished. Janet Wilson was charged in March with recklessly furnishing alcohol to minors, a misdemeanor, in Crown Point City Court. The case was transferred afterward to Lake County Superior Court.On Thursday, a check of county court records failed to find the case and no judge has been assigned to it. * * * Officials with county courts Thursday were not able to find the transferred case in the computer system.
St. Joseph County Prosecutor Michael Dvorak is charging Feely under a law that makes it a Class D felony to cause serious bodily injury while operating a motor vehicle with a controlled substance in the body."Judge overturns jury's verdict for molester" is the headline to this story in the Muncie StarPress. Some quotes:Dvorak's burden of proof is much lighter than it was when the law was first enacted in 1994. Initially, a controlled substance had to be in the blood. But prosecutors were losing in court because too many police, through either laziness or ignorance of the law, were collecting only urine from defendants after accidents and were failing to collect blood, said Andy Maternowski, a South Bend native who now practices criminal defense law in Indianapolis and often handles drug-related cases.
So in 1997, the General Assembly broadened the scope of the law, changing its language to say that, for a conviction, controlled substances "or their metabolites" could now be present in the body rather than just the blood.
Roger Maickel, a Purdue University professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology, said the revised law is not grounded in science. "I would not consider that a medical or scientific definition, but that does not surprise me with the Legislature," said Maickel, who has studied the field for 44 years. "Scientifically speaking, that's a bad law. A drug in the urine is not in the body. Geographically it is, but not medically. It cannot get in the brain, so it cannot have any effect (on driving), very simply."
Professor James Klaunig, director of toxicology at the Indiana University School of Medicine and former director of the state's Department of Toxicology, agreed. "What we teach is, material in urine shows use, material in blood shows impairment," Klaunig said. Klaunig said marijuana can remain detectable in the urine of a frequent user, or someone who smokes daily, for up to 28 days. It can linger in occasional users for up to two days, he said.
MUNCIE - A deputy prosecutor said Thursday he was "shocked" by a judge's decision to overturn a jury's verdict that a Muncie man was guilty of failing to register as a convicted sex offender.Posted by Marcia Oddi at July 9, 2004 12:00 PMA Delaware Circuit Court 3 jury this week found 34-year-old Orval M. Casada - convicted of charges stemming from sexual assaults on children in 1991 and 2001 - guilty of failure to register, a class D felony carrying a maximum three-year prison term.
The following day, however, Judge Robert Barnet Jr. - who had earlier rejected two proposed plea agreements in the Casada case - overturned the jury's verdict, ordering Casada released from the county jail.
"In 10 years as a deputy prosecutor, I have never even heard of a judge vacating a guilty verdict in a criminal case, thus letting the defendant go free," Deputy Prosecutor Mark McKinney said. "He forces this into a trial. The jury convicts in 20 minutes and then overnight he decides there was no evidence to support the elements of the crime and the jury was wrong. We are shocked."
Barnet said Thursday he was forbidden by law from publicly discussing his rulings. However, in his written order vacating the jury's verdict, Barnet ruled the prosecutor's office had failed to include mandatory language - the phrase "knowingly and intentionally" - in the original documents charging Casada with the crime.
In his order, Barnet said prosecutors were required under state law to use that terminology, and then to prove in court that Casada knew he was required to register as a sex offender and failed to do so.
McKinney said prosecutors would appeal Barnet's ruling and try to persuade a state appeals court to reinstate the guilty verdict. Local prosecutors have already met with representatives of the state attorney general's office about pursuing the appeal.
"This was a technicality that could have been overcome without the drastic result that we ended up with," the deputy prosecutor said. "It was an error that didn't seem as egregious as [Barnet] has made it out to be."