The Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals has issued a recent opinion where the 50-year-plus sentence of a defendant was reversed because, as the Court held, the sentence was “disproportionate” to the sentences received by other defendants for essentially the same stuff. This type of ruling is rare – because courts of appeal rarely reverse sentences set by trial judges. However, in this case, the Court compared the sentence issued by the trial court to other sentences issued by other trial courts for similar crimes. What was perhaps different here was that the defendant’s lawyer was able to locate and point to other cases – and this took time. We did this recently for a client of ours accused of a serious crime (where the possible sentence was the main focus of the whole case), and we convinced the trial court NOT to impose a bigger sentence. This type of analysis takes time – but can be more than worth it for the client.
