State v. Thompkins

Citations

• 2017 Ohio 1061

Syllabus

COUNSEL - AGGRAVATED ROBBERY - R.C. 2941.25: Defendant was not deprived of the effective assistance of counsel where counsel's cross-examination of a state's witness may have elicited additional evidence of defendant's involvement in the offenses where the witness's testimony on cross-examination was duplicative of his testimony on direct examination. Defendant's convictions for aggravated robbery were not against the weight of the evidence and were supported by sufficient evidence where the evidence showed that defendant acted as a lookout while his codefendants entered a hotel, held a gun to the hotel clerk's head, and stole the clerk's personal cell phone and money from the hotel's cash register. By failing to seek the merger of his convictions for aggravated robbery in the trial court, defendant forfeited for appellate review all but plain error on his claim that the offenses were allied offenses of similar import. The trial court did not commit plain error by failing to merge defendant's two convictions for aggravated robbery where defendant and his codefendants robbed a hotel clerk of her personal cell phone and the hotel of cash from its register, because the offenses involved separate victims and were, therefore, offenses of dissimilar import within the meaning of R.C. 2941.25(B).