In 2007, the General Assembly enacted the AWA, which repealed the former Megan’s Law classification system and replaced it with a new statutory scheme in which persons convicted of sex crimes after the effective date of the act are categorized as Tier I, Tier II or Tier III offenders based solely on the offenses for which they were convicted. The AWA imposes new postrelease registration and community notification requirements for each tier of offenders that are more restrictive in most cases than the requirements imposed on similar offenders under Megan’s Law.
The 2007 legislation also includes provisions, codified in R.C. 2950.031 and 2950.032, that order the state attorney general to reclassify all sex offenders who had previously been classified by a court under the Megan’s Law scheme into one of the three new AWA tiers based solely on the crime for which they were convicted. The attorney general was ordered to notify these prior offenders that their reclassificati on would be effective Jan. 1, 2008, and that as of that date they would be subject to the new AWA registration and community notification requirements applicable to the tier of offenders into which they had been placed.
Bodyke, Schwab and Phillips received letters from the attorney general in November 2007 notifying them that pursuant to the AWA, as of Jan. 1, 2008, they would be reclassified as Tier III offenders and therefore subject to more stringent registration requirements and to community notification requirements to which they had not been subject under their judicially ordered classification under Megan’s Law. All three men appealed their reclassificati ons on various constitutional grounds to the 6th District Court of Appeals, which consolidated the cases for review. The 6th District rejected the appellants’ arguments, and affirmed their reclassificati on under the AWA as constitutional . Bodyke sought and was granted Supreme Court review of the 6th District’s decision.
Writing for a 5-1 majority of the Court in today’s decision, Justice Maureen O’Connor observed that, just as the judicial branch is bound by the constitution to faithfully apply the law as written by the legislature, the legislative and executive branches are barred by the constitution from enacting or enforcing laws that encroach on the powers of the judiciary.
In this case, she wrote: “The AWA’s provisions governing the reclassificati on of sex offenders already classified by judges under Megan’s Law violate the separation-of-powers doctrine for two related reasons: the reclassificati on scheme vests the executive branch with authority to review judicial decisions, and it interferes with the judicial power by requiring the reopening of final judgments. It is well settled that a legislature cannot enact laws that revisit a final judgment. We have held for over a century that ‘the Legislature cannot annul, reverse, or modify a judgment of a court already rendered …'”
Citing the Supreme Court of Ohio’s 1902 decision in Gompf v. Wolfinger, Justice O’Connor wrote: “‘A judgment which is final by the laws existing when it is rendered cannot constitutional ly be made subject to review by a statute subsequently enacted …’ The reclassificati on scheme in the AWA works to ‘legislatively vacate the settled and journalized final judgments of the judicial branch of government.’ … (T)he General Assembly cannot vest authority in the attorney general to reopen and revise the final decision of a judge classifying a sex offender.”
“The power to review and affirm, modify, or reverse other courts’ judgments is strictly limited to appellate courts (under) Section 3(B)(2), Article IV, Ohio Constitution. The AWA intrudes on that exclusive role and thus violates the separation-of-powers doctrine. Moreover, once the final judgment has been opened, the AWA requires that the attorney general ‘shall determine’ the new classification s of offenders and delinquent children who were classified by judges under the former statutes. … In doing so, it violates a second prohibition by assigning to the executive branch the authority to revisit a judicial determination. … Thus, we conclude that R.C. 2950.031 and 2950.032, which require the attorney general to reclassify sex offenders who have already been classified by court order under former law, impermissibly instruct the executive branch to review past decisions of the judicial branch and thereby violate the separation-of-powers doctrine. We further conclude that R.C. 2950.031 and 2950.032, which require the attorney general to reclassify sex offenders whose classification s have already been adjudicated by a court and made the subject of a final order, violate the separation-of-powers doctrine by requiring the opening of final judgments.”
The court’s decision also discussed an important legal doctrine, stare decisis, which provides that judges should follow prior, relevant precedent when deciding cases. Justice O’Connor, who authored the 2003 decision that announced the Ohio standard for overruling precedent, Galatis v. Westfield Insurance Co., clarified Ohio law on stare decisis in two important regards. First, quoting from this Court’s 1989 decision in Rocky River v. State Emp. Relations Bd., she reiterated the rule that ‘stare decisis applies to rulings rendered in regard to specific statutes, [but] it is limited to circumstances “where the facts of a subsequent case are substantially the same as a former case.”‘ … Noting that the AWA is substantially different from Megan’s Law, she concluded that the court’s prior decisions that had upheld that the constitutional ity of Megan’s Law were not dispositive of Mr. Bodyke’s appeal, which involved a new statute, the AWA.
Second, Justice O’Connor wrote that “there is a more vital and compelling limitation on the doctrine as it has developed in Ohio: its inapplicabilit y to constitutional claims.” Citing the Court’s decision in Rocky River, she noted that the Court then had acknowledged that stare decisis “does not apply with the same force and effect when constitutional interpretation is at issue.” She expressly stated in today’s opinion that ?