The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
The Ohio Supreme Court has denied a request to reconsider their ruling earlier this year that boneless chicken wings can have bones.
“It is the rare exception, rather than the rule, for this court to grant motions for reconsideration,” Justice Patrick Fischer wrote in the majority opinion denying the request.
Fischer went on to say that even when he disagrees with a majority opinion in a case, he would vote to deny a motion for reconsideration that “merely reargues a case.”
But the justice also used the denial to call out “problems” with the release of the decision.
“In this case, the delay in our issuing a decision on this motion, coupled with early public pronouncements by members of this court related to this case, both in the media and on the judicial record prior to our decision on this motion, could generate an appearance of impropriety,” Fischer wrote.
Because the motion denial was “straightforward,” Fischer said the decision could have been made “promptly after its filing in August rather than leaving it to linger into the heart of election season.”
“The Ohio Supreme Court is a court of law, not of temporal public opinion,” he concluded.
Justices Michael Donnelly, Melody Stewart and Jennifer Brunner dissented in the case.
Donnelly said the court received “unprecedented media attention” after the opinion that ruled that the statement “boneless” does not mean one should be surprised to find bones.
“The majority’s opinion has been rightly subjected to ridicule,” Donnelly wrote.
Donnelly said the fact that there was a whirlwind of attention on the case, which included agreements on the dissent in the case, should raise flags for the justices.
“To be sure, our jurisprudence is not dictated by the commentariat, but given the overwhelming response to the absurdity of the majority opinion, one would think that the members of the majority could have reexamined their thinking and concluded that maybe it’s possible, even if just barely, for reasonable minds to disagree,” Donnelly wrote.
The justice argued that a summary judgment can’t be granted or affirmed on appeal “unless reasonable minds can come to but one conclusion.”
In the previous decision on the case, the court was unable to do that, he said, and “it would be wrong to accord no significance to our disagreement in light of the summary-judgment standard.”
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He said the fact that the summary judgment was decided despite the disagreement is “not a positive harbinger for Ohioans.”
“The members of the majority have granted virtual immunity to entities involved in the meat industry for any bone-related injury that might be caused by their ‘boneless’ products,” Donnelly wrote. “I (and most of the people who have read about this case) dissent.”
