Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien and a veteran police detective saw their voyeurism case against a former teacher slipping away until the Ohio Supreme Court intervened yesterday.
In a 6-1 ruling, the justices overturned lower-court rulings that threw out key evidence -- secretly recorded videotapes of girls undressing -- in the case against a former theater director at Wellington School in Upper Arlington.
If the court had upheld the rulings, only one misdemeanor count likely would have remained against Lawrence A. Dibble, 43, of Dublin, O'Brien said.
With the court's ruling, 17 felony counts of voyeurism remain standing against Dibble, who had been accused of illegally videotaping girls since 2002.
The dispute centered on trial court and appellate court rulings that suppressed evidence gathered from Dibble's home in 2010 on grounds that an Upper Arlington police detective had lied to a judge to obtain a search warrant.
Dibble's lawyers argued that the search warrant was invalid because the detective referred to a former student as a "victim" even though she had consensual sex with Dibble as an 18-year-old graduate.
The lower courts agreed, saying the use of the word victim amounted to knowingly providing false information in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant.
The justices wrote, however, that the lower courts employed too narrow a definition of victim by viewing the term to include only victims of crime.
"In this case, Dibble allegedly sexually exploited two young women," including doing "back rubs behind closed doors, other inappropriate touching and photographing both women in see-through unitards," the court's opinion said.
"Therefore, the detective's use of the word 'victim' ... did not amount to his knowingly and intentionally including false information in his search-warrant affidavit."
Judges' determinations on whether information in an affidavit is false must take into account the "non-technical language used by non-lawyers," the justices said.
Justice Paul E. Pfeiffer dissented in the high court's ruling, writing that information about Dibble's relationship with a consenting adult described no crime and thus provided no basis for a search warrant.
The court ordered the case returned to Franklin County Common Pleas Court for a hearing on the motion to suppress evidence consistent with its ruling.
David H. Thomas, one of Dibble's lawyers, said he was disappointed and is studying whether to ask the justices to reconsider their ruling or file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.
O'Brien said he welcomed the "acknowledgement and recognition by the court that police officers aren't lawyers, aren't judges, and they often are hurried. ... Their language should not be interpreted in a hyper-technical way."
The prosecutor said detective Andrew Wuertz was "devastated" by the previous rulings that he misled a judge to obtain a search warrant. "He's a person who would never do that," O'Brien said.
"He sent me an email (yesterday) saying, 'It's a good day to be a cop.' "
@RandyLudlow
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