COLUMBUS, Ohio (Legal Newsline) - You may not be able to fight city hall, but in Ohio you can avoid being ordered to pay a city restitution under a state law designed to compensate crime victims for their losses.
The Ohio Supreme Court, in a Nov. 12 decision, ruled that municipal corporations don’t fit the definition of “victim” in Marsy’s Law, a provision added to the Ohio Constitution after statewide referendum in 2018 to strengthen the rights of crime victims and their families.
The City of Centerville invoked Marsy’s Law to recover money from Michael P. Knab after he was convicted of falsely calling police to report an “active shooter” in his home. The law, named after a woman who was killed by her ex-boyfriend, provides a list of rights for crime victims including the right to be present at all court proceedings and obtain restitution.
The law defines “victim” as “a person against whom the criminal offense or delinquent act is committed” or who is harmed by it. The meaning of “person” is often extended to private partnerships and corporations, the court ruled, because they are merely groups of people engaged in a similar task.
An Ohio appeals court allowed a bank to collect restitution under Marsy’s law for money it was required to refund a depositor after cashing a forged check.
Municipal corporations have many of the same legal rights and functions as private corporations, the court continued, but they are also political subdivisions with their own powers of government. While Ohio courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have occasionally extended the meaning of “person” to include municipalities, Marsy’s law implicates rights under the state constitution like “safety,” “privacy” and “dignity” that don’t apply to a city.
“The normal and ordinary use of the word “person” suggests that Ohio voters would not have understood that term to include a public corporation,” the court concluded.
Centerville wasn’t the first to give Marsy’s law a try. A sheriff’s office tried to collect the money it paid in an undercover drug buy, but the court ruled it wasn’t the object of the crime. Another sheriff’s office was rebuffed when it tried to collect extradition expenses.
“The statutory framework—particularly the term `victim’ —does not express a legislative intent “to make law enforcement or other governmental agencies, whose only involvement in the reported crime is their response to it in their official capacities, eligible for restitution,” the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in its 22-page opinion.
Prosecutors are often accused of trying to retool laws in ways their drafters never intended. One of the most famous cases was Yates vs. U.S., a 2015 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a fisherman’s conviction under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for throwing undersized fish overboard to elude a game inspector. Yates argued the definition of “tangible object” in the law, intended to capture any method of financial recordkeeping, couldn’t reasonably be extended to a fish.