State v. Mullins

Citations

• 2026 Ohio 2399

Syllabus

A criminal defendant cannot challenge on appeal the trial court's failure to merge two offenses where the defendant expressly agreed in writing at his plea change that the offenses \do not merge.\ And though the trial judge, at the sentencing hearing, made a comment noting that he was trying to \decide how many decades\ the defendant should spend in prison, the sentence imposed was not contrary to law where (1) the judge considered the overriding purposes of sentencing in R.C. 2929.11 and the seriousness and recidivism factors in R.C. 2929.12, (2) a separate prison term was imposed for each offense, and each prison term was within the appropriate statutory range, and (3) the judge then made the necessary consecutive-sentence findings.