State v. Nagy

In State v. Nagy, Greene App. No. 2003CA21, 2003 Ohio 6903, the defendant, at sentencing, argued that he was entitled to 143 days of jail time credit, while the court's probation officer disagreed. "Defendant-Appellant's objection that he is entitled to more jail-time credit than the trial court ordered invoked the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection which R.C. 2967.191 enforces. His Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law then entitled him to a hearing on his objection. Inasmuch as the objection was to the correctness of a factual determination the court is required to make, the court could not overrule the objection on the mere unsworn representations of its probation officer concerning whether Defendant-Appellant's prior incarceration arose out of a set of facts separate and apart from the convictions on which his sentence was imposed. "Defendant-Appellant was not required to file an additional motion. By invoking his R.C. 2967.191 right as entitling him to a particular result, Defendant-Appellant put the court and the state on notice of his claim and the alleged facts upon which the claim was grounded. It then became the State's burden to show that he is not so entitled because some or all of the 143 days for which Defendant-Appellant sought jail-time credit actually arose out of a set of facts separate and apart from the criminal conduct involved in his offense. "A jail-time credit challenge is more akin to a pretrial motion to suppress evidence, which, though it is grounded on a constitutional right, must nevertheless be presented to the court in the form of a proper application in order for the right to be invoked. And, like a motion to suppress, an objection grounded on a defendant's R.C. 2967.191 right and the court's duty to enforce it is determined on a preponderance of the evidence standard, not the reasonable doubt standard." Nagy.