While prosecuting a Hamilton County woman for child endangerment, the state provided evidence of 11 different ways she punished her minor stepson without assigning a count number to each type of discipline. The jury convicted the woman of four counts, meaning they could correspond each act to each count in the indictment, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.

A Supreme Court majority reversed the First District Court of Appeals’ decision to vacate Amy Rodriguez’s 2023 conviction. The appellate court found that the jury instructions and verdict forms failed to specify which punishment corresponded to each count and that the jury expressed its confusion to the trial judge.

Writing for the Court majority, Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy stated that nothing in Ohio law requires that jury instructions provide specific facts for each criminal count. She noted that Rodriguez was presented with a bill of particulars detailing each punishment in 11 separate paragraphs and that at trial both parties connected each act to its respective count.

“The verdicts themselves prove the jury could distinguish between counts since Rodriguez was convicted of only four of the 11 counts. If the jurors did not know which count correlated with which disciplinary act, they would more likely have either convicted or acquitted Rodriguez on all counts,” Chief Justice Kennedy wrote.

Justice R. Patrick DeWine and Daniel R. Hawkins joined the chief justice’s opinion. Justices Joseph T. Deters and Megan E. Shanahan did not participate in the case. Third District Court of Appeals Judge Mark C. Miller and Fifth District Court of Appeals Judge Craig R. Baldwin, who sat for Justices Deters and Shanahan, respectively, also joined the majority opinion.

Justice Patrick F. Fischer concurred in judgment only.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Brunner noted the jury twice asked the trial judge to explain which of Rodriguez’s punishments of her stepson corresponded with each count, and both times the judge refused to provide any additional information. The judge also did not allow the jury to take notes during the 11-day trial, Justice Brunner stated.

“The jury had no plausible means from the instructions it was given to sort out the evidence of each category of punishment and relate it to each count of the indictment,” she wrote.

Today’s decision by the Court did not reinstate Rodriguez’s conviction. Rodriguez presented two arguments before the First District, but the appellate court only addressed one: that the trial court’s errors violated her constitutional rights. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the First District to address Rodriguez’s second claim: that her trial counsel was ineffective.

Child Endangerment Charges Identically Worded
In February 2022, a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Rodriguez on 11 counts of endangering a child under R.C. 2919.22(B)(2). Each count corresponded to disciplinary acts taken against her stepson, identified in court records as “C.D.” The indictment alleged that 10 of the 11 counts concerned acts occurring on undetermined dates between January 2018 and April 2021. One count related to conduct on or about Jan. 1 and Jan. 2, 2021.

Except for Court 5’s specific dates, all the counts were “carbon-copy” indictments alleging that Rodriguez “recklessly tortured or cruelly abused C.D.,” resulting in serious physical harm.

Rodriguez requested a bill of particulars, which the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office provided. The bill of particulars was organized by paragraphs which, though not numbered, mirrored the indictment. Each paragraph outlined the specific punishment corresponding to each count.

At the trial in October 2023, the prosecutor presented evidence of each punishment through several witnesses, including C.D., his younger brother, his father, Rodriguez’s daughter and niece, and several medical professionals. The prosecutor also referenced a “trauma timeline” that C.D. complied to outline each disciplinary act.

Before closing arguments, the prosecution amended the charges, reducing two counts from second-degree felonies to third-degree felonies. The lower charge removed the language that the discipline caused serious physical harm.

During closing arguments, the prosecution used C.D.’s trauma timeline to walk through the indictment, naming each individual count by number before explaining which act corresponded to that count. Similarly, Rodriguez’s attorney walked through the evidence.

Jury Presented Information to Deliberate
Following closing arguments, the judge instructed the jury. The instructions for the two third-degree felony charges were identical. The remaining counts were identical and defined “serious physical harm.”

The jury deliberated and submitted a note to the trial judge asking “which punishment corresponds to each count.” After speaking to the prosecutor and Rodriguez’s attorney, the judge instructed the jury to refer “to the jury instructions and the testimony and the evidence presented.” Neither side objected to the judge’s answer.

When the jurors next met for deliberations, they again sent the judge a note asking “which count aligns with each separate and distinct matter?” The judge responded, without objections, telling the jury to refer to the jury instructions and “use your collective memories to apply the testimony and evidence that was presented to the instructions.”

The jury returned with convictions on Counts 2, 4, 6, and 10, acquitting Rodriguez of seven counts. Rodriguez asked the judge to set aside the verdict and acquit her, but the judge denied the request.

At sentencing, the judge outlined the acts for each charge of her conviction: forcing C.D. to stand in a corner facing the wall for up to 14 hours a day for multiple days in a row, forcing him to lean against a wall with only his fingertips for extended periods of time, confining him to a room secured with an alarm and three cameras for several days, and restricting his food, which led to malnourishment.

She was sentenced to three to four and a half years in prison.

Rodriguez appealed to the First District. In a 2-1 decision, that court found that the trial court committed plain error by not connecting each count in the indictment to each punishment for the jury. The First District vacated Rodriguez’s conviction and barred retrial.

The prosecutor appealed the First District’s decision to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Analyzed Jury Directives
Chief Justice Kennedy explained that the Court reviews for plain, or obvious, error when a criminal defendant fails to object to trial errors. Whether a trial judge committed plain error depends on if the error was obvious and impacted the trial’s outcome.

The opinion noted that Rodriguez’s trial attorneys did not object to the jury instructions, verdict forms, or to the trial judge’s answers to the jury’s questions. It analyzed those aspects of the trial.

The jury instructions explained the crime of child endangerment, and the trial judge defined the key terms of R.C. 2919.22(B)(2), including “recklessly, “torture,” “cruelly,” “abuse,” “child,” and “serious physical harm.”

“In this court, Rodriguez makes only the conclusory argument that the instructions were insufficient because during deliberations, the jury twice asked the judge to differentiate between counts,” the opinion explained.

But the Court noted that the jury acquitted Rodriguez on seven counts and found her guilty of four others, “thereby showing its ability to differentiate between counts.”

While not providing the factual context for each count, the indictment gave Rodriguez notice that she allegedly violated R.C. 2919.02(B)(2) 11 times. And when asked for more information, the prosecutor provided a bill of particulars that contained one paragraph of details per count.

“Rodriguez could reasonably and rightly assume that the first paragraph of criminal conduct in the bill of particulars corresponded with Count 1 and so on,” the Court said.

The indictment and bill of particulars allowed Rodriguez to know the nature of the charges against her and prepare her defense , the opinion stated. And her attorney correctly differentiated between the counts during her closing argument and sentencing.

The Court held that, in cases involving a carbon-copy indictment, the prosecution need only present evidence of discernible facts corresponding to each count to obtain a conviction.

Jury Did Not Receive Clear Guidance, Dissent Maintains
Justice Brunner wrote that failing to ensure the jury is provided with minimal differentiation between the counts constitutes plain error, and the First District’s decision to vacate Rodriguez’s conviction should stand.

The majority’s presentation of the facts of the case is more orderly than what was presented to jurors who could not take notes during the 11-day trial in which 23 witnesses testified, the dissent stated. The only time the jury was told which alleged punishment was at issue for each count was during closing arguments, and the judge told the jurors that closing arguments are not part of the evidence.

The dissent noted C.D.’s trauma timeline presented some guidance to the jury, but the timeline of punishments did not follow the order of the punishments in the indictment. And while the Court’s opinion reorganizes the trial evidence so it is presented on a count-by-count basis, the jury was presented with the case on a witness-by-witness basis. The jury did not have the benefit of the evidence “being this coherent and neatly organized and presented at trial,” the dissent stated.

Rodriguez’s rights were violated because the jury was not provided with sufficient information to connect the evidence of the 11 categories of punishments to each of the 11 identically worded counts in the indictment, Justice Brunner concluded.

2025-0066. State v. Rodriguez, Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-2573.

View oral argument video of this case.

Please note: Opinion summaries are prepared by the Office of Public Information for the general public and news media. Opinion summaries are not prepared for every opinion, but only for noteworthy cases. Opinion summaries are not to be considered as official headnotes or syllabi of court opinions. The full text of this and other court opinions are available online.