Curative (or limiting) instructions work except when they don't
You've gotta love the criminal justice system. One rule the courts follow is to pretend that the trial judge can magically selectively erase the jurors' memories. Do you remember the memory erasing device that was used in the movie Men in Black? The "neuralizer"? Subjects were asked to look at it and with a flash, the neuralizer could erase a recent memory and a "Man in Black" could substitute a different memory for the subject.
Well, Ohio trial judges do not have neuralizers. So what is a judge to do when one of the State's witnesses says something the jurors should not hear? Something that would prevent the defendant from having a fair trial? The trial judge tells the jurors to "disregard" what they just heard from the witness stand. And then the reviewing courts pretend that the jurors followed the judge's instructions and so they must have disregarded that which they were instructed to disregard. Then you get a decision from the court of appeals that says, "all of the defendant's assignments of error having been overruled, the judgment of the trial court is affirmed."
But in the Ottawa County case of State v. Davis, the Sixth District Court of Appeals decided the curative instruction was just not enough. Davis was on trial for "tampering with evidence" for allegedly swallowing drugs in attempt to avoid prosecution. An arresting officer told the jury that he knew Davis because he had dealt with him "in the past as far as narcotics complaints and everything else." This was improper evidence under Ohio Evidence Rule 404(B) as you can read here.
