Background
Gregory Drake pleaded guilty in two separate Richland County cases to two fifth-degree-felony counts of aggravated possession of drugs arising from offenses committed on different days. The trial court imposed a 12-month prison term in one case and five years of community-control supervision in the other.
The court ordered the community-control period tolled until Drake left prison and directed him to enter a community-based correctional facility immediately after completing the prison term. Drake appealed, arguing that Ohio law authorized neither the delayed start of community control nor the prison-followed-by-CBCF arrangement.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth District held that the trial court could delay the start of Drake’s community-control period while he served the prison term imposed in the other case. The majority reasoned that Ohio’s tolling statutes contemplate that community control ceases to run while an offender is confined and that a person cannot serve community control while incarcerated. Judge King dissented from this portion of the decision, concluding that the statutes toll only community control already underway and do not authorize delayed commencement.
The court unanimously held that the trial court lacked authority to require Drake to serve CBCF confinement consecutively to the prison term. Because CBCF placement qualifies as a sentence of imprisonment and no applicable statutory exception permitted consecutive service, the court vacated the community-control sentence and remanded with instructions to remove the CBCF term. It otherwise left the 12-month prison sentence unchanged and waived court costs.
Key Takeaways
- An Ohio court may impose a prison term for one offense and community control for another.
- The majority held that community control may be tolled while the defendant serves the prison term, although one judge dissented on that issue.
- A CBCF term cannot be ordered to begin consecutively after a prison term when no statutory exception to concurrent service applies.
Why It Matters
The decision distinguishes between delaying community-control supervision during incarceration and stacking a residential CBCF sanction after a prison term. Trial courts in the Fifth District may use the former approach, but they cannot convert a mixed prison-and-community-control sentence into consecutive periods of confinement without statutory authority.
The partial dissent also identifies an unresolved interpretive issue: whether statutes addressing the tolling of community control already in progress authorize a court to postpone community control from the outset.