State v. Holden

490 N.E.2d 629, 23 Ohio App. 3d 5, 23 Ohio B. 38, 1985 WL 9335, 1985 Ohio App. LEXIS 10096
CourtOhio Court of Appeals
DecidedFebruary 27, 1985
DocketC-840106
StatusPublished
Cited by5 cases

This text of 490 N.E.2d 629 (State v. Holden) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Ohio Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Holden, 490 N.E.2d 629, 23 Ohio App. 3d 5, 23 Ohio B. 38, 1985 WL 9335, 1985 Ohio App. LEXIS 10096 (Ohio Ct. App. 1985).

Opinion

Per Curiam.

This cause came on to be heard upon an appeal from the Court of Common Pleas of Hamilton County, Ohio.

The appeal is from the judgment entered and sentence imposed pursuant to the verdict of the jury finding the defendant-appellant, Steven Holden, guilty as he stood charged of the aggravated murder of his father, Paul Holden. We note, parenthetically, that three other individuals were also charged jointly in a separate indictment with the same crime, and were tried separately from each other in prosecutions that led to convictions in two of the three cases. This appellant is now serving a sentence of imprisonment for life with a minimum of twenty years.

The first assignment of error is that the court erred, as a matter of law, in failing to suppress certain statements made by the appellant to police subsequent to his arrest. The postulate for this assertion is that the police arrested Holden for investigation of a criminal offense without probable cause, that the arrest was thereby rendered constitutionally infirm, and that such infirmity mandated the suppression of any statement made thereafter.

At about 12:10 a.m., July 25, 1983, an officer assigned to the Criminal Investigation Section of the Cincinnati Police Division received a telephone call which caused him to go to 1625 West-wood Avenue, an address’within the city, where, reportedly, a man had been “struck in the face with an ax.” When he and a fellow officer arrived at the given address, they learned that the wounded person (subsequently identified as Paul Holden, the victim named in the indictment) had been taken to a local hospital. After viewing the scene and conferring with other police there, the officers left to attempt to interview Paul Holden at the hospital.

At approximately 12:15 a.m., on the same day, police officer Gregory Beck while on routine patrol within the city received a report through his radio that a white male named Steven Holden, 6' 4" in height with a slim build and last seen in the area of the park located at Westwood and Grand Avenues, Cincinnati, in the company of a young woman, was wanted for investigation in connection with an assault.

Some ten minutes later, Officer Beck arrived at the park and observed a man and woman in an area separated from him by a fence. Beck talked to the man and, in response, that individual climbed over the barrier, conversed further with Beck and answered in the affirmative when asked if his name was Steven Holden. Holden was then handcuffed and was transported with his female companion first to 1625 Westwood Avenue and then to the *7 district station to be held for release to other officers attached to the homicide section. Ultimately, Steven Holden was questioned by such investigators after having been given appropriate advice of his constitutional rights, and made the challenged inculpatory statements to them. Paul Holden died on October 1, 1983, as a result of the head wound he suffered when struck by the ax.

In essence, Steven Holden told his interrogators that his stepbrother, Michael Ballein, and he had entered into a plan to kill Paul Holden because of actions on his part within the household which they felt they could no longer tolerate. Pursuant to that plan, Steven Holden stated, Ballein struck Paul Holden in the head with an ax while Holden was prone in his bed. Steven Holden further admitted that he stood ready to strike his father with a claw hammer in the event Ballein’s attack was not successful. Moreover, the respective girlfriends of Ballein and Steven Holden were also involved in the plot before and during the assault. The blow with the ax was sufficiently forceful to imbed it into Paul Holden’s skull, but he was able to rise from his bed and to stumble about the house, moaning, for some two hours before the quartet involved in the scheme fled the scene.

Appellant submits that the pivotal question is whether the prosecution proved that Officer Beck’s arrest of Steven Holden was supported by probable cause and equates that standard with that specified in R.C. 2935.03 as justification for his argument.

In answering this question, we are guided initially by the decision in State v. Fultz (1968), 13 Ohio St. 2d 79 [42 O.O.2d 259], paragraph two of the syllabus, which states:

“Where a police officer has received information over the police radio and that information is such as to give the officer reasonable grounds to believe a felony has been committed, such officer has probable cause to make an arrest.”

The fundament upon which this rule rests is the recognition that a police broadcast is in the nature of an official communication, which is ordinarily regarded as a trustworthy source of information. Id. at 81. Accordingly, the court observed, “* * * upon the receipt of such information it is the duty of the officer to act and act quickly.” Id.

In deciding State v. Huneke (Jan. 2, 1985), Hamilton App. No. C-840238, unreported, we applied the rule of Fultz to validate the detention of one who was stopped by a police officer who had received an “all county” radio broadcast concerning an automobile and two occupants involved in an aggravated robbery that had been committed shortly before the transmission.

We believe the question posed by appellant to be answered definitively in United States v. Hensley (1985), 469 U.S -, 83 L. Ed. 2d 604.

There, a police officer of the city of St. Bernard, Ohio, who had been told by an informant that Hensley had driven the getaway car from the scene of an armed robbery in that locale, had issued a “wanted flyer” to other area police departments stating that Hensley was wanted for investigation of the robbery. The flyer described Hensley, gave the date and location of the robbery and asked the other departments to pick the suspect up and hold him for the St. Bernard police. Ultimately, police in Kentucky stopped an automobile being driven by Hensley and at that time one of the officers present recognized a passenger in the car as a convicted felon. The officers saw the butt of a handgun protruding from beneath the passenger’s seat and a subsequent search of the vehicle uncovered other hand guns. Hensley was arrested and ultimately indicted on a federal charge of being a convicted felon in possession of firearms. The federal district court *8 denied Hensley’s pretrial motion to suppress the handguns from evidence, which had been advanced on the ground that the stop by Kentucky police was in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The court of appeals reversed Hensley’s conviction, holding that the stop of Hensley’s car was improper because the crime being investigated (the aggravated robbery in Ohio) was not imminent or ongoing, but rather was already completed, and that the “flyer” was insufficient to create a reasonable suspicion that Hensley had committed a crime.

In reversing the court of appeals, the Supreme Court held, at 612, that:

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2004 Ohio 5054 (Ohio Court of Appeals, 2004)
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Bluebook (online)
490 N.E.2d 629, 23 Ohio App. 3d 5, 23 Ohio B. 38, 1985 WL 9335, 1985 Ohio App. LEXIS 10096, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-holden-ohioctapp-1985.