STATE OF OHIO v. TERRANCE HOUGH
Nos. 98480 and 98482
Cоurt of Appeals of Ohio, EIGHTH APPELLATE DISTRICT, COUNTY OF CUYAHOGA
April 18, 2013
2013-Ohio-1543
BEFORE: Rocco, J., S. Gallagher, P.J., and McCormack, J.
JOURNAL ENTRY AND OPINION; Criminal Appeal from the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Case No. CR-499308
RELEASED AND JOURNALIZED: April 18, 2013
Terrance Hough, pro se
Inmate No. A550-442
Toledo Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 80033
Toledo, Ohio 43608-0033
ATTORNEYS FOR APPELLEE
Timothy J. McGinty
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor
By: Katherine Mullin
Assistant County Prosecutor
Justice Center - 8th Floor
1200 Ontario Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
{¶1} In this consolidated appeal, pro se defendant-appellant Terrance Hough (“Hough“) appeals from the trial court‘s denial of his motion for a new trial and his motion to correct his sentence. On appeal, Hough argues that the trial court should have granted his motion for a new trial because his original trial judge was biased against him. Hough furthеr argues that the multiple aggravated murder and attempted murder convictions should have merged because he was found guilty on a mass murder specification. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the trial court‘s final judgment.
{¶2} On August 7, 2007, Hough was indicted on capital charges for three counts of aggravated murder under
{¶3} Hough pleaded not guilty, and the case went to jury trial. On May 15, 2008, the jury found Hough guilty on all charges. At the close of the mitigation рhase, the jury recommended that Hough be sentenced to life without the possibility of
{¶4} In his first aрpeal to this court, Hough argued that the aggravated murder convictions were not supported by sufficient evidence, that the trial court erred in admitting certain other acts and victim-impact evidence, and that he was denied effective assistance of counsel. We disagreed and affirmed Hough‘s convictions. State v. Hough, 8th Dist. No. 91691, 2010-Ohio-2770. Hough appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, and the court declined to accept jurisdiction. State v. Hough, 126 Ohio St.3d 1601, 2010-Ohio-4928, 935 N.E.2d 47. Hough then filed an appliсation with this court to reopen his appeal, which we denied. State v. Hough, 8th Dist. No. 91691, 2011-Ohio-2656. Hough appealed that denial to the Ohio Supreme Court, and the court declined to accept jurisdiction in that appeal as well. State v. Hough, 129 Ohio St.3d 1454, 2011-Ohio-4217, 951 N.E.2d 1049.
{¶5} Hough next filed a petition for postconviction relief. The trial court denied the petition, and we affirmed the trial court. State v. Hough, 8th Dist. No. 95953, 2011-Ohio-3690. The Ohio Supreme Court declined to accept jurisdiction. State v. Hough, 130 Ohio St.3d 1440, 2011-Ohio-5883, 957 N.E.2d 301.
{¶6} At the time of his original postconviction proceedings, Hough‘s case was still assigned to the original trial judge, Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold. Hough
{¶7} On October 10, 2011, the Ohio Supreme Court determined that Hough met his burden of establishing the appearance of impropriety, granted Hough‘s affidavit of disqualification, and ordered that the case be returned to the court of common pleas for reassignment to another judge. The case was reassigned to Judge Carolyn Friedland. Justice Pfeifer‘s judgment entry granting the affidavit of disqualification stated:
According to Hough‘s affidаvit, the comments were posted on [c]leveland.com, a website affiliated with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the same day that Judge Saffold imposed Hough‘s sentence.
Judge Saffold has responded in writing to the concerns raised in the affidavit. She concedes that her personal email account was the source of the online comments about Hough‘s case. But Judge Saffold maintains that she did not post the comments. Rather, the judge avers that her personal email address is shared by other family members and it was her daughter who used the email account to post the comments about Hough‘s case. Since the comments were made by her daughter and not her, Judge Saffold does not believe the posting should be considered as evidence of her bias or prejudice.
After careful review of the affidavit and the judge‘s response, I find that Hough has met his burden of establishing that an appearance of impropriety exists in this case.
In April 2010, I, sitting as the acting chief judge, disqualified Judge Saffold based on similar online comments that originated from her personal email account about another criminal case. In re Disqualification of Saffold, affidavit-of-disqualification case No. 10-AP-036. In that case, Judge Saffold‘s online account was the source of critical comments about
defendant Anthony Sowell and Sowell‘s attorney. I found an appearance of impropriety in that сase due to the nature of the comments and their widespread dissemination. In the instant matter, Judge Saffold argues that no basis for her disqualification exists because her daughter posted the comments about Hough‘s case. That same argument was rejected in case No. 10-AP-036. In that case, Judge Saffold admitted that her personal email address was the source of the comments about the Sowell case, but she claimed that her daughter had posted the comments about defendant Sowell and his attorney. Although there was no evidence to contradict the judge‘s claim, the fact that comments originated from Judge Saffold‘s online account—even if the judge did not post the comments herself—was sufficient to compel her disqualification. In re Disqualification of Saffold, case No. 10-AP0036, at 3.
* * * *
Likewise there is no dispute here that public comments about Hough‘s criminal case originated from the judge‘s personal email address. It does not matter that the cоmments about Hough‘s case were posted after Judge Saffold had sentenced Hough. The timing of the comments does not remove the taint of impropriety where, as here, Hough has a pending postconviction proceeding before Judge Saffold.
(Footnote deleted.)
{¶8} On January 27, 2012, Hough filed in the trial court a motion for a new trial. On March 5, 2012, Hough filed in the trial court a motion to correct his sentence, asking the trial court to vacate his sentence and to hold a new sentencing hearing. These motions were considered and ruled upon by Judge Friedland, not Judge Saffold. The trial court denied both motions on May 10, 2012. Hough filed a notice of appeal from both journal entries, and presents three assignments of error for our review.
- Hough was denied due process due to the trial court‘s judicial bias.
- The trial court abused its discretion in denying Hough‘s motion for a new trial.
- The trial court erred in denying Hough‘s motion to correct sentence.
{¶10} Due process requires that a criminal defendant be tried before an imрartial judge. State v. LaMar, 95 Ohio St.3d 181, 2002-Ohio-2128, 767 N.E.2d 166, ¶ 34. If the record evidence indicates that the trial was infected by judicial bias, the remedy is a new trial. State v. Dean, 127 Ohio St.3d 140, 2010-Ohio-5070, 937 N.E.2d 97, ¶ 2. Judicial bias is defined as “a hostile feeling or spirit of ill will or undue friendship or favoritism toward one of the litigants or his attorney, with the formation of a fixed anticipatory judgment on the part of the judge * * *.” Id. at ¶ 48, quoting Pratt v. Weygandt, 164 Ohio St. 463, 132 N.E.2d 191 (1956), paragraph four of the syllabus. Judicial bias is “contradistinguished from an open state of mind which will be governed by the law and the facts.” Id., quoting Pratt at paragraph four of the syllabus.
{¶12} The state mistakenly asserts that Hough‘s due process argument is governed by
{¶13} Hough‘s first allegation of judicial bias pertains to the comment posted to cleveland.com from Judge Saffold‘s email account on her court-issued computer. The comment stated the following:
If a black guy had massacred five people then he would‘ve received the death penalty. A white guy does it and he gets a pat on the hand. The jury didn‘t care about the victims. They were set to cut him loose from day one. All of them ought to be ashamed.
Cleveland.com, Anonymous online comments are linked to the personal e-mail account of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold, http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/03/post_258.html (accessed Feb. 27, 2013). According to Hough‘s affidavit seeking disqualification, the comment was postеd on the same day that Judge Saffold imposed Hough‘s sentence, May 22, 2008. But the fact that this comment was made from Judge Saffold‘s computer did not come to light until much later. The story broke on cleveland.com on March 26, 2010. The Ohio Supreme Court subsequently ordered Judge Saffold removed from any further postconviction proceedings.
{¶14} Hough argues that this comment evidences Judge Saffold‘s prejudice and bias for a specific result in Hough‘s case: that she was biаsed in favor of Hough receiving the death penalty. The comment, coming from a presiding judge, is unprofessional and inappropriate, to say the least. We also note that the comment can be fairly characterized as extrajudicial if it is based on a judge‘s belief that, as a white defendant, the jury treated Hough more leniently than it would have had Hough been a black defendant.1 Hough‘s race is not relevant to the crimes for which he was charged and convicted.
{¶16} To be clear, our decision does not stand for the proposition that a due process, judicial-bias claim is subject to harmless-error analysis. The Ohio Supreme Court‘s decision in Dean appears to indicate that a defendant who successfully shows judicial bias need not demonstrate prejudice before obtaining a new trial. The Dean Court determined that the trial judge harbored bias and, even after acknowledging that
{¶17} Our decision today is not based on harmless error. Rather, we conclude that Judge Saffold‘s decision to follow the jury‘s recommendatiоn and to sentence Hough to a life sentence, regardless of the comment posted from her court-issued computer, is highly relevant evidence that she was not so biased against Hough as to render the trial fundamentally unfair.
{¶18} We also reject Hough‘s argument that Judge Saffold‘s decision to deny Hough‘s
{¶19} With regard to the expert fees, Judge Saffold granted every one of Hough‘s motions for expert assistance, including a mitigation expert, a forensic toxicologist, a neuropsychologist, a firearms expert, an investigator, a psychiatrist, and a clinical psychologist. The docket reflects that the court applied its normal fee schedule. While Hough may believe the fee schedule was unreasonable, Judge Saffold‘s decision does not evidence bias, because the fees allotted were consistent with the judge‘s normal practices. Accordingly, we do not find judicial bias in this decision. Because Hough cannot demonstrate that his trial was fundamentally unfair as a result of judicial bias, we overrule the first assignment of error.
{¶20} In his second assignment of error, Hough argues that the trial court erred in denying his motion for a new trial pursuant to
{¶21} A motion for a new trial is governed by
{¶22} We apply an abuse-of-discretion standard when reviewing a trial court‘s refusal to grant a new trial, and we will not reverse the trial court‘s decision unless it appears that the matter asserted as a ground for a new trial materially affects the substantial rights of the defendant. Id. An abuse of discretion is not just an error of judgment; it implies that the trial court‘s attitude was arbitrary, unreasonable, or unconscionable. Id.
{¶23} When a motion for a new trial is made on the basis of newly discovered evidence, the motion must be filed within 120 days after the day the verdict is rendered.
{¶24} Hough‘s motion was made on the basis of newly discovered evidence: the discovery of the online comment made from Judge Saffold‘s email account. Hough also argues that the judge‘s decision to deny Hough‘s
{¶25} But even if Hough had sought leave to file the motion for a new trial, and even if leave to file had been granted, we would still conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying Hough‘s motion for a new trial. In order to prеvail on a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, the defendant must show that the new evidence (1) discloses a strong probability that it will change the result if a new trial is granted, (2) has been discovered since the trial, (3) with due diligence could not have been discovered before the trial, (4) is material to the issues, (5) is not merely
{¶26} Here, the evidence that Hough presents in support of his claim of judicial bias does not disclose a strong probability that it will change the result if a new trial was granted. As discussed in the first assignment of error, the evidence does not indicate that Judge Saffold presided over an unfair trial. The comments posted from her email account after the life sentence was rendered express dissatisfaction with the jury‘s decision not to impose the death penalty. But this does not, in itself, demonstrate that Judge Saffold failed to conduct a fair and impartial trial. We are precluded from assessing whether Judge Saffold‘s decision to deny Hough‘s
{¶27} Furthermore, Hough cannot demonstrate a strong probability that the outcome of a new trial in front of a different judge would have produced a different outcome, because the evidence of Hough‘s guilt was overwhelming. State v. Hough, 8th Dist. No. 91691, 2010-Ohio-2770, ¶ 35 (overwhelming evidence of Hough‘s guilt
{¶28} In his third assignment of error, Hough argues that the trial court erred in denying his motion to cоrrect his sentence. According to Hough, the trial court erred in failing to merge all of his sentences for the three counts of aggravated murder and the two counts of attempted murder. Hough‘s motion was properly denied by the trial court because the motion is barred by res judicata.
{¶29} The doctrine of res judicata is applied in criminal cases to bar further litigation of issues that were previously raised or that could have been raised previously in an appeal. State v. Brooks, 8th Dist. No. 98380, 2012-Ohio-5292, ¶ 7, citing State v. Perry, 10 Ohio St.2d 175, 226 N.E.2d 104 (1967), paragraph nine of the syllabus.
{¶30} We have previously held that a defendant must raise on direct appeal the issue of whether two offenses constitute allied offenses of similar import subject to merger. If the defendant does not raise the issue on direct appeal and then attempts to raise the issue in a postconviction motion, res judicata applies. State v. Goldsmith, 8th Dist. No. 95073, 2011-Ohio-840, ¶ 6. See also, e.g., State v. Collins, 8th Dist. No. 97496, 2012-Ohio-3687, ¶ 10-11 (same); State v. Davis, 8th Dist. No. 96908, 2012-Ohio-1635, ¶ 12-13 (same). Hough is raising this issue for the first time in a postconviction appeal. Applying Goldsmith and its prоgeny to the instant case, res judicata applies, and the trial court did not err in denying Hough‘s motion to correct his sentence.
It is ordered that appellee recover from appellant costs herein taxed.
The court finds there were reasonable grounds for this appeal.
It is ordered that a special mandate be sent to said court to carry this judgment into execution.
A certified copy of this entry shall constitute the mandate рursuant to
KENNETH A. ROCCO, JUDGE
SEAN C. GALLAGHER, P.J., and
TIM McCORMACK, J., CONCUR