Ohio Supreme Court Rules Probate-Juvenile Court Had No Authority To Grant Criminal Witness Immunity

In a per curiam opinion, a unanimous Supreme Court of Ohio held that the Probate-Juvenile Division of the Warren County Court of Common Pleas did not have the authority under Ohio law to grant immunity to witnesses in criminal cases because the Ohio Legislature had not given it that authority.[1]

This case began when the state prosecuted Jessica Reynolds for misdemeanor domestic violence and child endangering because of an incident with her minor son.[2] Because the state accused her of committing misdemeanors, she was tried and convicted after a bench trial in front of Judge Gary A. Loxley of the Warren County Court. But she appealed, and an Ohio intermediate appellate court vacated her convictions because the “county court lacked jurisdiction over the child-endangering offense and lacked jurisdiction to conduct a bench trial.”[3]

On remand, the prosecutor asked the county court to grant immunity to her son so that he could freely divulge information related to the incident, but Judge Loxley denied the request “for want of jurisdiction, noting that under the statute, applications for immunity must be filed in the court of common pleas.”[4] So the prosecution then filed a request for immunity in the Probate-Juvenile Division of the Warren County Court of Common Pleas. Judge Joseph W. Kirby granted the request for immunity so that the parties could examine Reynolds’s son about whether “during an interview with Reynolds’s counsel, [he had] described the events giving rise to the charges differently than how he had initially alleged them to law enforcement.”[5]

Reynolds appealed again, but the intermediate appellate court dismissed the appeal for lack of a final appealable order. So Reynolds came to the Supreme Court of Ohio seeking a writ of mandamus to “compel judge Kirby to vacate his order granting immunity” and a writ of prohibition to “prevent judge Loxley from giving effect to [the grant of immunity] at Reynolds’s criminal trial.”[6] She also sought a writ of mandamus to compel the prosecutors on the case “to petition the Warren County Common Pleas Court for witness immunity.”[7]

In an opinion that closely parsed the relevant Ohio constitutional and statutory provisions, the court granted a peremptory writ of prohibition to compel Judge Kirby to vacate his immunity order because “the probate-juvenile court unambiguously lacked jurisdiction to do so.”[8] It denied Reynolds’s request for relief against Judge Loxley since there was no indication “in the record that Judge Loxley intend[ed] to give effect to that order even if vacated.”[9] And it denied her request for mandamus against the prosecuting attorney since he could, but was not obligated to, seek immunity for witnesses.[10]

As for the jurisdictional issue, everyone acknowledged that Ohio law “authorizes ‘the court of common pleas of the county in which the proceeding is being held’ to compel the witness to testify and to grant the witness immunity from prosecution for any criminal act about which the witness will testify.”[11] But as the Supreme Court of Ohio made clear, the “important question for [its] purposes [was] whether the statute’s reference to ‘the court of common pleas’ include[d] all divisions of that court.”[12] In the case of the Probate-Juvenile Division of the Warren County Court, it held it did not.[13] The Supreme Court of Ohio said this was so because the legislature established juvenile courts by statute, and therefore they “‘possess[] only the jurisdiction that the General Assembly has expressly conferred upon’” them.[14] And “while the General Assembly has expressly conferred the powers and jurisdiction of the court of common pleas on the domestic-relations and juvenile divisions in some counties, Warren County is not among them.”[15] Likewise, the supreme court said that the division’s status as a “probate court does not vest it with jurisdiction to grant witness immunity.”[16]

While the court did not explain its decision to grant a peremptory writ of prohibition instead of the requested writ of mandamus, it made clear that, under Ohio law, for a writ of prohibition to issue, the party seeking it must establish “by clear and convincing evidence (1) the exercise of judicial power, (2) the lack of authority for the exercise of that power, and (3) an injury that would result from the denial of the writ for which no adequate remedy exists in the ordinary course of the law.”[17]

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