City of East Cleveland v. Odetellah

Patricia A. Blackmon, Judge.

This appeal requires us to decide two issues: whether a trial judge’s verdict is against the manifest weight of the evidence, when the trial judge finds a merchant guilty of the crime of unlawful restraint for handcuffing an employee to a chair for seven hours and whether the prosecution is required to prove lack of probable cause to arrest a suspect as an element of the offense of unlawful restraint before a trial court may sustain a conviction for unlawful restraint.

Amin Odetellah, defendant-appellant, timely appeals his conviction after a bench trial for…