Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

TMCNet: Move to stop 911 call illegal: Assailant who broke cell phone 'disrupted public service,' high court says

[November 19, 2009]

Move to stop 911 call illegal: Assailant who broke cell phone 'disrupted public service,' high court says

Nov 19, 2009 (The Columbus Dispatch - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Flattening the tires of an ambulance speeding to an emergency.

Blowing up a city waterline.

Smashing a single cell phone.

All are potential violations of a state law against disrupting public service, a unanimous Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a precedent-setting ruling.

Raynell Robinson of Marysville was convicted of the fourth-degree felony for destroying a cell phone being used by his nephew, Antonio Robinson, to summon help after Raynell had assaulted Antonio during a late-night fight in September 2006.

The 3rd District Court of Appeals threw out the conviction, saying the law was designed to apply only to large-scale disruptions of public service. But the high court reinstated the conviction with yesterday's 13-page decision.

"The plain language of (the law) does not limit its application to the interference with public emergency systems and utilities on a large scale, as the 3rd District found," wrote Justice Maureen O'Connor in the majority opinion.

Even an act as small as smashing a cell phone can be a violation "if that conduct substantially impairs the ability of law enforcement officers, firefighters, rescue personnel, emergency-medical-services personnel, or emergency-facility personnel to respond to an emergency or to protect and preserve any person or property from serious physical harm," the court declared.

This is the first case in which Ohio's highest court weighed in on whether the law applies to an act such as destroying a single cell phone. While the 3rd District court ruled it didn't, three other Ohio appeals courts had decided the opposite.

Raynell Robinson, 37, was sentenced to two years in prison for witness intimidation and 15 months for disrupting public service by wrecking the phone. His attorneys contended that Robinson was not guilty because help already was on the way after an earlier, abbreviated 911 call from the nephew, and arrived within minutes of the phone being destroyed.

But the law "does not require proof of a substantial impairment of the officers' response time. The pertinent inquiry is directed toward their ability to respond," O'Connor wrote.

"Antonio was only able to tell the 911 dispatcher that he was at the Meadows (apartment complex) and that his face had been injured. When Robinson smashed the phone and disconnected the call, the dispatcher was attempting to elicit a more specific location from Antonio." O'Connor said police had to search the sprawling Marysville apartment complex and ask neighbors before they found the fight scene. In the meantime, she said, the uncle continued to assault his nephew and threatened to kill anyone who called law enforcement.

drowland@dispatch.com To see more of The Columbus Dispatch, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.columbusdispatch.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend