# State v. Willan

> Ohio Supreme Court · June 11, 2013 · 136 Ohio St. 3d 222

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9801476

## Case

- **Full name:** The State of Ohio, Cross-Appellant, v. Willan, Cross-Appellee
- **Court:** Ohio Supreme Court
- **Decided:** June 11, 2013
- **Citations:** 136 Ohio St. 3d 222; 994 N.E.2d 400; 2013 Ohio 2405
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Pfeifer
- **Judges:** French, Hall, O'Donnell, Kennedy, Pfeifer, Lanzinger, O'Neill, O'Connor
- **Cited by:** 5 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9801476

## Opinion text

Pfeifer, Acting C.J.,
dissenting.
{¶ 12} I join Justice Lanzinger’s well-reasoned dissent, but write separately to highlight the General Assembly’s failure in legislative drafting exemplified by former R.C. 2929.14(D)(3), which the majority opinion relegates to a footnote to fully accommodate its 24 lines of unrelenting abstruseness consisting, remarkably, of the sum total of 307 words and a mere one period, a punctuation mark set out as a lone sentinel facing odds similar to that of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, a battle that occurred over the course of three days during the second Persian invasion of Greece, and is estimated by historians to have occurred in either August or September, or perhaps both, in 480 B.C., pitting an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, against the Persian Empire of Xerxes I, bravely standing before the onslaught of invaders but ultimately unable to stanch the unrelenting tide of the overpowering hordes of words and statutory numbers including R.C. 2903.01, 2907.02, 2903.02, 2925.04, 2925.11, 2925.02, 2925.06, 2925.36, 3719.07, 3719.08, 3719.16, 3719.161, 4729.37, *227 4729.61, 3719.172, 4729.51, 4729.54, 2941.1410, 2929.20, without so much as a helping hand from a single, solitary semicolon, colon, or parenthesis, other than the parentheses surrounding the capital letters denoting the divisions of statutory sections that are sprinkled throughout the statute, a statute that purports to inform the citizenry of the potential penalty for certain enumerated criminal acts, but by cramming so many words about sentencing into one sentence, sentences itself to uselessness, especially in the case of an offender involved in a pattern of corrupt activity, regarding which R.C. 2929.14(D)(3) surprisingly is completely without specificity, in that it fails to cite a statutory section outlining what constitutes corrupt activity when it otherwise lists specific statutory sections relating to all the other offenses to which it applies, a statutory circumstance up with which we should not put.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9801476. Public record. Not legal advice.