v.
Tucker
Lead Opinion
We affirm the judgment of the court of appeals for the following reasons. App.R. 26(B) provides that applications to reopen in the court of appeals must be filed within ninety days of journalization of the appellate[*153] judgment sought to be reopened unless good cause for the delay is shown. Appellant contends that his application was delayed because the prison library did not have a new volume of Rules of Appellate Procedure immediately after App.R. 26 took effect. He also argues that he was ineffective acting as his own counsel pro se, on direct appeal.
In State v. Reddick (1995), 72 Ohio St.3d 88, 90, 647 N.E.2d 784, 786, we indicated that procedures to reopen appeals existed before July 1, 1993, the effective date of App.R. 26(B). Accordingly, we do not find good cause because a volume of appellate rules was not immediately available in the prison law library.
The judgment of the court of appeals is affirmed based on State v. Reddick, supra.
Judgment affirmed.
Moyer, C.J., Douglas, Wright, Resnick and F.E. Sweeney, JJ., concur. Pfeifer, J., dissents. Cook, J., not participating.Dissent
dissenting. The complexities of the law and the burdens of incarceration present enough barriers to the inmate trying to act as his own counsel without adding the further difficulty of an inadequate law library.
In this case, there was a lengthy delay in providing the Rules of Appellate Procedure to Tucker’s prison law library. Without that new volume, there is no good reason to believe that Tucker should have known the proper appellate procedure.
It has already been established that the state must provide a law library in every correctional facility. It follows that the library should be properly and timely maintained.