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State v. Davidson9/14/2001
DECISION.
Criminal Appeal From: Hamilton County Municipal Court
Judgment Appealed From Is: Affirmed
The defendant-appellant, Betty Jo Davidson, brings this appeal from the judgment entered and the sentence imposed pursuant to the verdict of a jury finding her guilty of the charge of assault, drawn in accordance with R.C. 2903.13(A). The substance of the charge was that during the late evening hours of February 18, 2000, Davidson knowingly caused physical harm to Aaron Robinson by repeatedly stabbing and cutting him on his lower body, arms, and face with a knife. In his opening statement to the jury, defense counsel admitted that Davidson had used a knife to cut Robinson, with whom she had had a relationship, both casual and sexually intimate, extending over a period of years, but asserted that she had done so in defense of herself.
Davidson is represented in her appeal by counsel other than her trial counsel, and has submitted four assignments of error. The first and second raise, respectively, the questions of whether the evidence adduced by the prosecution was sufficient to sustain the conviction as a matter of law, and whether the verdict was so contrary to the manifest weight of the evidence as to create a miscarriage of justice.
The facts upon which the charge of assault was predicated are, in major part, undisputed. At about 9:30 on the evening of February 18, 2001, Officer Charles Neeley of the Cincinnati Police Division was on routine patrol on the thirty-second block of Eastern Avenue within the city when he saw Davidson, in an intoxicated condition, "yelling at people as they were walking down the street." Officer Neeley advised Davidson to "start heading home," but when he returned to the area shortly after giving that advice, Davidson was still on the street in the company of another woman. He asked Davidson's companion "to make sure [Davidson] got home safely," and told Davidson to "please let see out here for a third time * * * or she would go to jail for disorderly conduct while intoxicated." At about 11:00 p.m., Officer Neeley was dispatched for "a weapon run * * * a person cut * * * and the address was 3227 Eastern Avenue." He and a fellow officer found a man, subsequently identified as Aaron Robinson, bleeding from "several lacerations on his body." Specifically, he saw wounds on Robinson's lower torso in the abdominal area, two on his forearm, and some on his face. An unidentified person had applied a makeshift bandage to Robinson's arm that, when removed by Cincinnati fire department paramedics, revealed wounds so deep as to have penetrated, in Neeley's words, "the fatty layer." Robinson, who was "highly intoxicated," was taken to a hospital, where, along with other treatment, his wounds were sutured. He named Davidson as his assailant.
Davidson's version of the night's events was that, as she had been making her way home, as ordered by Neeley, she had seen Robinson outside of his apartment, which was located "two houses down" from where she lived. Her acquaintanceship with Robinson began in 1995 as "boyfriend and girlfriend." In March 1997, he "beat her badly" with a ball-peen hammer, as a consequence of which he was imprisoned for a year upon his plea of no contest to a charge of felonious assault. Davidson also testified to another instance when Robinson had thrown a claw hammer at her back, which had missed her and "stuck into the wall," and another instance when he had "hit in the face with a shovel." All of this had occurred while the two were "living together" and despite her knowledge that Robinson had "a reputation for violence" and "was pretty much unsafe * * * and unpredictable as to what he going
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