The Supreme Court of the State of Ohio is the highest court in the U.S. state of Ohio, with final authority over interpretations of Ohio law and the Ohio Constitution. The court has seven members, a chief justice and six associate justices, who are elected at large by the voters of Ohio for six-year terms. The court has a total of 1,550 other employees. Since 2004, the court has met in the Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center (formerly known as the Ohio Departments Building) on the east bank of the Scioto River in Downtown Columbus. Prior to 2004, the court met in the James A. Rhodes State Office Tower and earlier in the Judiciary Annex (now the Senate Building) of the Ohio Statehouse.The Ohio Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary is established and authorized within Article IV of the Ohio Constitution.S.
Abstract This article reexamines the constitutional foundations and modern misuse of Alford pleas, arguing that what the Supreme Court intended as a narrow and exceptional procedure has drifted far from its origins. Drawing on the author’s experience as a trial judge, the piece explains the strict safeguards articulated in North Carolina v. Alford—including the requirement of strong evidence of guilt, a tangible benefit to the accused, and a truly voluntary choice—and demonstrates how these conditions have increasingly eroded in contemporary practice. The article critiques the expansion of Alford pleas into the realm of postconviction innocence litigation, where they operate less as constitutional compromises and more as coercive “Dark Pleas” that suppress truth seeking, avoid evidentiary testing, and preserve wrongful convictions. By exposing how these plea practices undermine transparency, accuracy, and public trust, the article calls for judicial restraint, mandatory evidentiary hearings, and statutory reforms to prevent Alford pleas from functioning as expedient tools that obscure innocence rather than illuminate it.
Criminal legal systems around the world rely heavily on defendants foregoing their right to trial and pleading guilty. However, legal scholars, social scientists, and practitioners have identified and empirically examined numerous problems with pleas, such as the high potential for coercion, innocent defendants falsely pleading guilty, and undue incentives in exchange for accepting plea offer. In this article, leading guilty plea experts (practitioners and researchers) were asked to identify what they considered to be the most urgent questions surrounding pleas. Across nine commentaries, three primary themes emerged. First were calls for increased transparency in pleas, specific to rules of discovery and access to exculpatory information, and in uncovering the hidden nature of the plea negotiation process. Second were concepts of fairness and voluntariness, such as uncounseled pleas, particularly for misdemeanour defendants, and the dubious assumptions made by courts regarding the presumption of voluntariness. Third was the theme of fair and just outcomes, particularly false guilty pleas. Four of the commentaries focused on innocence, describing and encouraging more research on the factors that increase false guilty pleas, including excessive plea discounts, specialized sentencing offers for juvenile defendants, and ‘time‐served’ offers, either to induce initial guilty pleas (pre‐trial phase) or to avoid official exonerations of those wrongly convicted (post‐conviction phase). Across all commentaries, experts identified areas in need of future research, both in continuing to understand the problems known to plague systems of pleas and in developing improved methods to ensure the guilty plea process is transparent, voluntary, and just.
In the shadow of a ballot issue attempting to enshrine abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution, a of the Ohio legislature devised an intervening constitutional amendment which set a special election, despite having outlawed special elections earlier in the year. The intervening question before voters was whether to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments from fifty percent plus one to sixty percent. While the scheme was viewed by many as the supermajority’s way to stop the abortion rights amendment from becoming a constitutional right, there is an argument that using emotionally charged issues such as abortion is a pretext for schemes that would preserve and perpetuate oligarchic power.
The U.S. floral industry is constantly shifting due to several factors that are involved in nearly every aspect of an industry that sells a living product.In order to determine these factors, over forty leaders from different sectors within the industry were interviewed in order to gain expert insight into which factors are directing these shifts.Utilizing the participants' responses, Leximancer software was used to conduct a quantitative content analysis using a machine learning technique.Through our analyses, we pinpointed many of the same recurring responses from the participants regarding structural shifts in the industry, omnichannel development, and key future success factors.Implications are discussed.
