Background
Floyd J. Cosavage, Jr. fled police during a high-speed motorcycle chase in July 2021 and eventually crashed. After the case was bound over to the Stark County Court of Common Pleas, a grand jury indicted him for failure to comply with an order or signal of a police officer. Cosavage pleaded guilty, received an 18-month prison sentence, and did not appeal.
Cosavage filed unsuccessful postconviction petitions in 2024. In December 2025, he filed a motion asking the trial court to vacate the judgment and dismiss the charge for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. His argument was that another county had already imposed judgment and punishment arising from the same incident before Stark County indicted him. The trial court treated the motion as a petition for postconviction relief and dismissed it as untimely.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth District affirmed. Although Cosavage labeled his filing as a jurisdictional motion, the substance of his argument alleged that the Stark County prosecution violated the constitutional protection against double jeopardy. It therefore was not a true challenge to the common pleas court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. Because the filing asserted a constitutional violation and sought to have the judgment and sentence vacated as void, the trial court properly reclassified it as a postconviction petition.
The petition was both untimely and successive. Because Cosavage did not directly appeal his conviction, his deadline was 365 days after the time for filing an appeal expired; the court identified May 22, 2022, as the direct-appeal deadline. Cosavage did not file the petition at issue until December 16, 2025, and he did not attempt to satisfy the statutory requirements allowing consideration of an untimely petition. The trial court consequently lacked jurisdiction to reach the petition’s merits.
Key Takeaways
- A court evaluates a postjudgment motion by its substance, not merely by the title the defendant gives it.
- A double-jeopardy claim does not become a subject-matter-jurisdiction challenge simply because the defendant characterizes the judgment as void.
- An Ohio trial court lacks jurisdiction to consider an untimely postconviction petition unless the petitioner satisfies the statutory exception requirements.
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces the procedural limits governing collateral attacks on Ohio criminal convictions. Defendants cannot avoid the filing deadline for postconviction relief by recasting a constitutional claim as a jurisdictional challenge.
It also illustrates the practical importance of distinguishing a court’s power to hear a category of cases from constitutional defenses to a particular prosecution. Only the former presents the kind of subject-matter-jurisdiction objection that may be raised at any time.