Dennis Watkins, the prosecuting attorney of Ohio’s Trumbull County, sparked national outrage last month when he pursued criminal charges against Brittany Watts, a woman who miscarried at home and was then dragged into court when a nurse called the police on her. A grand jury declined to indict Watts last week, but reproductive rights advocates stress that Watkins’ choice to pursue the case reflects an escalating policing of pregnancies nationwide, fueled by local prosecutors’ power to target women who lose a pregnancy.

The controversy unfolded in the run-up to Ohio’s late December filing deadline to run for prosecutor in 2024. There was a brief opportunity for the state’s upcoming elections to test whether local prosecutors would commit to respecting the will of voters on reproductive rights. Residents of Trumbull County had just voted in November to protect abortion rights, approving a statewide measure known as Issue 1 by a margin of 14 percentage points. Its proponents blasted Watkins for betraying the measure’s “spirit and letter” in going after Watts (Issue 1 enshrined a “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in the state’s constitution). 

But then the December filing deadline came and went, putting an immediate lid on that prospect. 

No one filed to run against Watkins, who is virtually guaranteed to secure an 11th four-year term in November without needing to explain his actions to voters. (The deadline passed for people running as party candidates but independents can still file by March, though they rarely win such races in Ohio.) 

In fact, Watkins has never faced a challenger in any of his other nine reelection bids since 1984. Over his time as prosecutor, he has fought to keep people with mental illness on death row, and in 2019, he defended a prosecutor in his office who frequently mocked defendants with crude public jokes, dismissing ethics concerns.

It’s the same scene around the state. Only 15 of Ohio’s 88 prosecutor elections this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, according to Bolts’ compilation in each county. This means that the vast majority of the state’s prosecuting attorneys are running unopposed this year; Bolts has confirmed that no more than one candidate has filed to run in 73 of the 88 counties. 

Like Watkins, many of these prosecutors oversee offices that have faced misconduct allegations but have suffered no consequences from state officials. A recent investigation by multiple news organizations showed how failures by state agencies have allowed prosecutors across Ohio to get away with breaking the law to win convictions. The investigation detailed how one staff prosecutor repeatedly violated defendants’ rights while working for three Ohio counties over the last two decades but continued to be employed. In each of these three counties, the incumbent prosecuting attorneys—Lucas County’s Julia Bates, a Democrat, Ottawa County’s James VanEerten, a Republican, and Wood County’s Paul Dobson, also a Republican—are running unopposed this year.

When there’s a lack of top-down oversight, elections can offer an alternative mechanism of accountability, forcing officials to defend their actions and create some path for an official’s removal. But that all hinges on people actually running.

Fanon Rucker, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran for Hamilton County prosecutor in 2020, referenced many prosecutors’ failure to even set up conviction integrity units to investigate possible errors and correct wrongful convictions despite the misconduct allegations they face. “If a person is running unopposed and doesn’t feel like that’s a priority, then who’s going to hold their feet to the fire?” he asked. “Who’s going to speak to the community to have them unelected if they don’t take on those types of projects? “

To be sure, Ohio’s most populous counties are more likely to see contested prosecutor elections this year. 

Unlike in 2020, each of Ohio’s three largest counties have more than one candidate filed for the race. In Franklin County (Columbus), the incumbent’s retirement has triggered a four-way race, with the winner of the Democratic primary likely favored to take the job. In Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Republican Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Powers faces Democrat Connie Pillich, a former state lawmaker. And in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), progressive law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn is challenging Democratic incumbent Michael O’Malley in the March primary.

Still, the lack of candidates is in no way constrained to smaller rural counties. Of the 27 counties with more than 100,000 residents in Ohio, 70 percent drew just one candidate. Watkins’ Trumbull County, southeast of Cleveland, has 200,000 residents. Bolts’ analysis shows the majority of Ohio’s population lives in counties with uncontested races.

Four years ago, even O’Malley ran unopposed in Cleveland. Ahn, who is challenging him this year, says he was shocked at the time to see the race was uncontested, especially given the punitive turn O’Malley’s took during his first term. “We saw a drastic increase in the number of children tried as adults, we saw the county issue more death sentences than any other county in the United States, and so I was really interested in who was going to challenge O’Malley in 2020,” Ahn told Bolts. “The answer to that question ended up being nobody.”

Ahn tried gauging local acquaintances’ interest in challenging O’Malley this year. “By and large, the most common response was, ‘I’m not challenging the machine,’ or ‘Nobody can beat the machine,’” he said. “After hearing this over and over again, I thought it was unacceptable for O’Malley to go uncontested two cycles in a row.” 

In running, Ahn says he’s at least forcing a public debate about local criminal legal policies. “I thought that just even having this conversation is a public good for the voters of Cuyahoga County, for us to think about how we can actually promote public safety,” he said. His campaign blocked O’Malley from securing the local Democratic Party’s endorsement at a convention this month.

It’s unusual enough for any candidate to challenge an incumbent prosecutor in Ohio. It’s even rarer for one to do so while proposing criminal justice reforms—like Ahn, who promises for instance to never seek the death penalty and reduce adult prosecutions of minors.

Prosecuting attorneys tend to vocally fight reform proposals regardless of their party, which has occasionally clashed with the politics of Ohio’s GOP-run legislature. Some Republican state lawmakers have teamed up with Democrats to introduce major reform legislation, but these bills typically run into a bipartisan wall of opposition from prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed a bipartisan bill that limited the use of the death penalty against individuals with mental illness. Prosecutors from both parties, including Cuyahoga County’s O’Malley, fought the bill’s passage. The same year, Ohio also adopted a bipartisan bill that abolished life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors, over the opposition of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, an organization that lobbies lawmakers on behalf of the state’s 88 prosecuting attorneys. 

“They’re pretty much in lockstep, they’re pretty much in unison,” said Kevin Werner, who supported that death penalty bill as policy director at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reforms. He says prosecutors from both parties band together regardless of who supports a reform proposal. “If it’s a bill that intends to increase the penalty, or increase the duration that a person could be sentenced to incarceration, they’re in favor of it,” Werner told Bolts. “If it’s a bill that rolls back any of those kinds of things, they’re opposed to it as sure as the sun will rise.”

“They’re often trying to change the standards of proof, making it easier to secure a conviction,” he said. “They want to make their jobs easier.”

Elsewhere in the nation, victories by reform-minded candidates have changed this dynamic and led to policy disagreements among prosecutors. Ohio is far from that, but Ahn hopes to break the mold of the typical prosecutor. He thinks his background as a former public defender gives him a “different experience and a different perspective on the justice system” than voters usually hear from prosecutor candidates.

“There still is this political assumption that, in order to win, you have to be 90s-style ‘tough on crime’ elected officials,” Ahn said. “What I’m finding in my conversations with folks across the county is that’s not necessarily true. But for folks who come up within prosecutor’s offices and then themselves run for prosecutor, these assumptions are often still accepted as a fact.”

Rucker says his 2020 run for prosecutor in Hamilton County, a metro area that includes Cincinnati, was a lesson in how bruising local elections can be. 

“This is the single most powerful position in the county because of the discretion, because of the influence, because of the relationships,” Rucker said. “You have to raise a lot of money, and you have to have an equal amount of influence and authority as the incumbent that you’re running against.”

As a longtime local judge, Rucker says he felt he had the standing to pull off a campaign. But many attorneys who want to challenge a sitting prosecutor anywhere in the state may be afraid of making a powerful enemy who can have enormous impact on their careers. “‘If I run and lose, how will this affect my financial bottom line, or even the outcomes of my cases?’” Rucker said.

These same dynamics exist throughout the nation, making it common in nearly every state for only a fraction of prosecutor elections to be contested. But the dearth of prosecutor candidates in Ohio this year still stands out even by national standards. In the 2023 cycle, for instance, roughly a third of elections in Mississippi and Pennsylvania drew multiple candidates; half did in New York. 

Numerous factors can contribute to this scarcity of prosecutor candidates. Besides the fear of retribution, some Ohioans who talked to Bolts for this article spoke of difficulties fundraising, and said a general political apathy has set in due to the lack of competition for control of the state government as a result of practices like gerrymandering. 

Rucker, who is Black, said racism in politics may also weigh on the minds of people of color who consider running. He pointed to attack ads his Republican opponent, incumbent Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters, unleashed in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign that tied Rucker to some activism born of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

“An angry Black man who was tied into rioting groups who were going to come to the city and beat and rape women, and start fires and riots—that was the messaging, and that was the imagery in their ads,” Rucker told Bolts. “It was intended to emotionally sway suburban white women, Democrats and Republicans.” 

Rucker, who denounced the ads as “race-baiting” at the time, lost to Deters by five percentage points, even as Democrats won nearly all other county-wide offices.

“I was gonna be successful if it hadn’t been for some racist crap, which also may deter some folks from getting into races, particularly minorities,” Rucker said.

Shortly after the election, Rucker received a letter from a Hamilton County voter explaining why she voted for every Democrat on the ticket but him. The letter, which Rucker says he keeps on display in his office, affirmed his suspicions of how racism contributed to his loss.

“Mr. Rucker, I would not vote for you because you scared me,” the voter wrote. “When I watched your ads, all I saw from your deameanor [sic] was an angry, militant, black man. All I could think was that you would promote those traits.”

Deters, Rucker’s 2020 opponent, resigned in early 2023 to become a justice on the Ohio supreme court. Powers, his replacement, has already warned of rampant crime if she were to lose. Her campaign website says of the prosecutor’s office, “It is simply too important to let it fall into the hands of soft-on-crime criminal advocates.” Powers is uncontested in the GOP primary; in November she will face Pillich, a white Democrat.

In April, Powers warned of more liberal candidates transforming Cincinnati into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” two cities known for having large Black populations. “That’s veiled, stereotypical race baiting and fear mongering,” Rucker said. 

Rucker says he stayed out of this year’s prosecutor race because he’s enjoying his new work in private practice. But he also said he did not want to revisit the sort of attacks he suffered four years ago. 

“It took everything in me to hold my peace during that time and not cuss everybody out, and the second time I would,” he told Bolts. “I have zero interest in being resubjected to the kind of racially hostile messaging that was so very clearly central in the outcome of that previous campaign. Not interested. I’m enjoying my life too much.”

This article has been updated with information on the one county that had not shared its candidate list nor replied to our request by our deadline. Its prosecutor race turned out to be uncontested as well.

The post In Ohio, Uncontested Elections Worsen a Breakdown in Accountability for Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

Daniel Hughes had an awakening years ago when police in his hometown of Lima, Ohio, killed a Black woman named Tarika Wilson and shot her infant son.

“At the time, there were folks who were talking about how no one will ever remember her name,” said Hughes, who is now a pastor at Incline Missional Community Church in Cincinnati’s Price Hill neighborhood. “And I remember thinking ‘I will never forget her name,’ because it just awakened something in me.”

So when a University of Cincinnati police officer killed Samuel DuBose, an unarmed Black man, in 2015, Hughes decided to get his congregation involved in the fight for racial justice. They joined the Amos Project, a federation of congregations throughout the greater Cincinnati area committed to improving the quality of life for all residents. Amos is among a number of local groups that have made strides in recent years toward criminal justice reform, which contributed to a significant political shift in November.

In Ohio, where President-elect Joe Biden lost and Democrats fell short of flipping the state Supreme Court, local elections in two counties delivered progressive wins that have potential to transform the criminal legal system. Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, now has a sheriff who wants to lower incarceration rates, along with a slate of new reform-minded judges—though voters also narrowly re-elected a prosecutor who makes frequent use of the death penalty. In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, voters elected Democrats for every judicial seat on the ballot, approved a civilian police review board, and ousted a notoriously harsh prosecutor.

These wins mirror others in cities and counties nationwide, where voters embraced local candidates and ballot measures that promised progressive change, particularly on criminal justice issues like drug policy and policing. The shift highlights how grassroots organizing and coalition-building outside of four-year election cycles can expand electoral power. And it shows how focusing on down-ballot races can engage voters in ways that national elections may not, because it’s often clearer how the outcomes will directly affect people’s everyday lives. 

In 2018, Celeste Treece, a criminal justice organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, was focused on raising awareness about judicial elections in Hamilton County. “A lot of people didn’t even realize that we elected judges locally,” Treece said.

That year, Democrats flipped two seats on the First District Court of Appeals and picked up two seats on the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, which handles criminal and civil cases.   

To build on the momentum after the 2018 election, Treece and a group of friends started a court watch program to monitor judicial proceedings. Meanwhile, they continued talking to people in the community about the role of the courts and how judges were selected. 

“[Often] we only think about the criminal side, but there are a lot of civil matters that go through the courts, like child support and [debt collection],” said Treece. “Many people are going through those things and really don’t understand how the courts affect them.”

Information gathered during the court watch program helped inform Treece’s outreach during the 2020 election cycle. Treece and her team were able to organize small group Q&A sessions with judicial candidates so that voters could ask questions in an intimate setting. Treece also said the national conversation around federal judicial appointments motivated people to learn more about local judges. 

Although judicial races are nonpartisan in Hamilton County, Democrats invested in them like never before, winning nine out of 13 open seats in the appeals and common pleas courts in November. The slate included candidates with experience as public defenders and civil rights lawyers, who promised reforms like overhauling the bail system to reduce pretrial incarceration. In an interview with Cincinnati NBC affiliate WLWT, attorney Bill Gallagher credited racial justice protesters for the election of a slate of judges more reflective of the communities they serve. “What was being demanded by people attending those protests was more accountability, more change, more access, more fairness,” said Gallagher. 

Prentiss Haney, co-director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said the political shift in Hamilton County this year was due to multiple cycles of organizing that have gotten more people involved in local elections. He pointed to the efforts of faith leaders in 2016 to mobilize voters around Preschool Promise, a local ballot initiative that levied millions of tax dollars to fund near-universal preschool and other education programs. And he said that the momentum for political change in Hamilton County can be traced back even further, noting the role of the Amos Project, which has been around for 26 years.“The arc of the wins in Hamilton County has been connected to that base over the years,” he said.

In 2018, Hughes, the Cincinnati pastor, was involved in The Amos Project’s effort to pass Issue 1, a proposal to decriminalize low-level drug offenses. Although it did not pass, the group was able to build on that previous work as it started organizing in 2020. “There’s a sense of certainty [with faith institutions], a regularity around the practices, the ritual,” said Hughes. “The ability to bring people to an awareness, to bring people to a moment is intrinsic in faith communities.”

This year, the Amos Project held forums with Hamilton County sheriff candidates. Hughes said voters ultimately supported Sheriff-elect Charmaine McGuffey because she made significant commitments to reform the office. In April, McGuffey beat incumbent Jim Neil by a landslide in a Democratic primary election, running on a platform that included addressing poor jail conditions and opposing a jail expansion. In the general election, she won against Republican Bruce Hoffbauer, who attempted to stoke fear among voters by equating racial justice protests with violence and chaos.

Hughes referenced the recovery pod program that McGuffey spearheaded when she was a major in the sheriff’s department as an example of her leadership in improving jail conditions. The program began as an effort to help women with substance use disorder transition to life after incarceration. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was expanded to offer services to men. 

“Someone like McGuffey gives us the opportunity to start to build on the kind of vision or future that we want,” Hughes shared. 

But winning elections alone is not enough, he cautioned. For Hughes, building a winning coalition of voters is about getting people to stay involved in strategic organizing for equity and justice. 

“What I’m doing right now is I’m trying to get faith communities to recognize the actual power that they have, and name the things that they actually want to create in the world, versus just chasing after an election,” Hughes said.

In Franklin County, Adrienne Hood has a similar perspective. A prominent local figure in the fight for racial justice and police accountability, Hood said the defeat of the county’s chief prosecutor, Ron O’Brien, shows that voters want to change the way Black and Latinx people are treated in the criminal legal system. But she also acknowledged that it takes more than one election to achieve that.

In 2016, Hood’s son Henry Green was killed by two plainclothes Columbus police officers. O’Brien did not prosecute the officers, a pattern that was characteristic of his office. That year, O’Brien faced his first electoral challenge in 16 years. He won, but it set the stage for the renewed effort to remove him from office this year. 

O’Brien’s inaction led Hood to become more active in community organizing with groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and The Freedom BLOC, a Black-led organizing effort focusing on civic engagement and electoral organizing in the cities of Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, and Akron. 

Hood recalled the moment she learned O’Brien had been defeated. “There’s accountability sooner or later,” she said. “I was glad that this time around [O’Brien] was seen for who he is.”

But she was less enthusiastic about his replacement, retired judge Gary Tyack, who hasn’t taken a strong stance on certain reforms, like ending cash bail. 

“It’s definitely time for a change in that office, and I’m praying that this is a beginning,” Hood said. “I don’t look at Tyack as my savior, but it is definitely a start in the right direction … that has to be attributed to the grassroot organizations that are making the connections for the community.” She explained that when George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked protests nationwide, organizers in Franklin County channeled the outrage toward electoral action by educating protesters about O’Brien’s connections to the Fraternal Order of Police. 

In addition to ousting a longtime prosecutor, voters in Columbus overwhelmingly approved the formation of a civilian police review board. 

Hood says the actions of the Columbus police made the best case to the public for the civilian police review board. During this spring’s protests, the police pepper-sprayed several Black elected officials including U.S. Representative Joyce Beatty and Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin. 

“It is very unfortunate that it took three of the top Black officials here in Columbus, in Franklin County, to get [pepper-sprayed] in order to [say] that stuff has to change,” Hood said. 

After that incident, Hood said the conversation of a police review board took greater urgency. “It is something that has been recommended for years.” Hood said, recalling a community elder who told her that the fight for a police review board dates as far back as the 1980s. 

The energy motivating voter turnout also showed up in Franklin County judicial elections, with Democrats sweeping all eight open seats in the Commons Pleas Court, including the domestic and probate divisions. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Judge-elect Andy Miller said candidates talked more during this election cycle about substantive issues. “I noticed people are more appreciative of the concept of restorative justice,” he said.

With the election over, Hood says the work of groups like Freedom BLOC continues through conversations and community education. “Now, the real work is ahead of us,” she said. “That is educating and empowering the people of our community so that they know the responsibility in holding elected officials accountable does not start nor stop at the ballot box.” 

The post How Ohio’s Racial Justice Movement Won Big at the Ballot Box appeared first on Bolts.

Cincinnati’s top prosector, Joe Deters, has been a driving force for the death penalty in a state that sentences more people to death than nearly any other in the nation. Deters, a Republican, has sent more people to death row than any other prosecutor in Ohio. And Hamilton County, where he has served as prosecuting attorney for more than two decades, is among the 2 percent of counties responsible for a majority of death sentences and executions in the United States. 

But zeal for capital punishment has been waning among Ohio conservatives. Last year, Republican Governor Mike DeWine issued a freeze on executions, and this year prominent  conservatives endorsed a call to repeal the death penalty.

Now Deters is running for re-election in a race that could go a long way in moving Ohio toward that repeal. But rather than reconsidering his stance, Deters is doubling down. His challenger, Democrat Fanon Rucker—a former judge, prosecutor, and civil rights attorney—has taken the opposite position, promising not to seek the death penalty and to support its abolition.

“I would absolutely support repeal of it because our Supreme Court has identified, and folks across the country have realized, it’s ineffective, inefficient, and certainly there are arguments about the immorality as well,” Rucker told The Appeal: Political Report.

Unseating Deters could bolster advocacy against the death penalty, since pro-death penalty prosecutors and state prosecutor associations have played a powerful role in blocking criminal justice reforms in Ohio and elsewhere. 

“One reason we’re not seeing more reform is because prosecutors wield tremendous political influence, because many elected officials are fearful if they pass repeals the district attorney will call them soft on crime,”  said Hannah Cox, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “I do think the public is starting to catch up to the idea that [prosecutors] are holding the string.”  

—

Death penalty opponents have raised many objections to capital punishment, including that it’s a failed crime deterrent, that too many innocent people have been sentenced to death, and that people of color are disproportionately sentenced.  

In a case study published several years ago, legal researchers found statistically significant evidence that race has influenced the use of capital punishment under Deters’s leadership. Among other things, between 1992 and 2017, the scholars found, a case in Hamilton County with at least one white victim faced odds of being charged with capital murder at more than four times the rate of a similar case with no white victims, and a Black defendant who killed at least one white victim faced higher odds of receiving a death sentence than similarly situated defendants.

Growing criticisms have not deterred Deters, who sought the death penalty as recently as May in a case involving a man accused of deliberately crashing his vehicle into police cruisers and killing one officer. The county prosecutor told a Cincinnati public radio station at the time that his office doesn’t seek the death penalty often, “but when we do, we’re pretty good at it and we’re going to do our best in this case.” Deters did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Deters, who is Catholic, was not even swayed when, in August 2018, Pope Francis came out against capital punishment in all circumstances. “No matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person,” the pope said.

Deters told a reporter that “the pope is wrong” on capital punishment. At the time Deters was defending the death penalty for Anthony Kirkland, who murdered five women between 1987 and 2009.

“My friends who are priests, they don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Deters told the local ABC affiliate. “We’re dealing with vicious, evil killers. And it is self-defense in my mind for the death penalty, and that’s why we seek it.” He then said if people don’t want the death penalty, then “get rid of it, I don’t care, but I swore to uphold the law and that’s what I’m doing.”

—

This isn’t Rucker’s first shot at becoming Hamilton County’s top prosecutor; in 2004 he faced off against Deters and lost. But the county, which was once solidly Republican, has been trending blue in recent years and voted for Hillary Clinton over President Trump by ten percentage points in 2016, even as Ohio on the whole has become more conservative. After a moderately successful 2018 midterm cycle, Democrats are eyeing the prosecutor’s office as one of the last remaining GOP bastions in the county.

A change in the office could have an outsize effect on the state level, which has seen major changes around death penalty politics over the last few years.

Ohio’s last execution was in July 2018. In February 2019, DeWine, who had recently taken office, announced he would be halting all executions until the state found a new method that could pass constitutional muster. A month earlier a federal judge had described Ohio’s lethal-injection method as akin to a combination of waterboarding and chemical fire. “Ohio is not going to execute someone under my watch when a federal judge has found it to be cruel and unusual punishment,” DeWine said.

DeWine has not clarified his views oncapital punishment, though he was a sponsor of the 1981 bill to legalize Ohio’s death penalty. Many have speculated that, unlike Deters, DeWine’s strong Catholic faith has complicated his feelings on the issue.

Following DeWine’s pause on executions, other prominent Republicans started speaking out, including Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder who announced he’d become “less and less supportive” of the death penalty. Householder specifically raised concerns with its cost, and with the challenge of finding a feasible way to do the executions. (Two months ago,  Householder was arrested and ousted from government over a $60 million corruption scheme.)

Jessie Frank, a death penalty opponent with the Cincinnati-based Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, said DeWine’s moratorium has been helpful, but warned that the governor will one day leave office and “it’s important to make sure executions don’t start back up again.” Senate President Larry Obhof, a powerful gatekeeper in the state, remains opposed to the death penalty’s repeal.

There has been growing support for incremental reforms, but even those have been opposed by county prosecutors. Bipartisan legislation to ban the death penalty for people with serious mental illness has been considered by Ohio lawmakers for the last five years, and even passed the state House of Representatives in 2019. But prosecutors have lobbied hard against the legislation, and most recently defeated it in the state Senate. Victor Vigluicci, president of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association called the legislation “dangerous” and “not necessary to address any actual problems.”

—

Another major political development came in February, when a new group formed: Ohio Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The group, which is one of 15 chapters nationwide, rallied over 35 of the state’s conservative leaders, including former Governor Bob Taft, former Attorney General Jim Petro, and former U.S. Representative Pat Tiberi, to endorse the repeal of the death penalty. 

“Ohio is really coming from behind, even as of two years ago they weren’t really on the radar for states that might repeal the death penalty,” said Cox, the Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty national manager. “Wyoming has come very close in the last year [to repealing] and we’ve repealed the death penalty in New Hampshire and Colorado both in the last two years. I think if you were to see a state like Ohio repeal it, that could really have a domino effect on the region.” Twenty-two states to date have abolished the death penalty.

“Things have shifted in the last two years, now we’re focused fully on repeal,” said Hannah Kubbins, the state director at Ohioans to Stop Executions. Kubbins doesn’t expect much movement on the issue this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic, the lame duck session, and the presidential election. But she says advocates are gearing up to push through a repeal bill in the next legislative session.

Louis Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association declined to comment for this story, but said in February that “we’re disturbed” by discussions of repealing the death penalty. A month earlier Tobin said, “All of the challenges that we see to the death penalty right now will switch to life without parole. And the next thing you know we won’t have life without parole either.”

Kubbins, who emphasized that her nonprofit organization does not endorse candidates, said prosecutors and prosecutor associations “oppose any reform that could reduce their power.” She urged voters to pay attention to their county prosecutor races, and to consider how county resources spent on the death penalty could be redirected toward unsolved crimes. 

Rucker told the Political Report he would be “very willing to offer my voice of advocacy” for statewide repeal of the death penalty. “Justice demands consistency and it’s not consistent to have such overwhelmingly differing ends of punishment in a system that says it’s about treating all fairly regardless of their background,” he said.

If elected, Rucker has no plans to disassociate from state and national prosecutor organizations, but said his general focus would be on Hamilton County. He’s campaigned on eliminating cash bail for nonviolent offenses, establishing a conviction integrity unit, and creating a re-entry court to help reduce recidivism.  Frank, whose nonprofit Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center also doesn’t endorse candidates, said the prosecutor election could have “huge” ramifications for the death penalty.

“I don’t think most people in Hamilton County know much about the death penalty,” said Frank. “And I would say most people definitely don’t know that we are one of the biggest drivers of it.”

The post Cincinnati Is an Epicenter for the Death Penalty. Its Prosecutor Race Could End That in November. appeared first on Bolts.

Visit our coverage of 2020 local elections.

In two southern Ohio counties, voters signaled on Tuesday that local officials dealing with jail overcrowding should focus on reducing incarceration, rather than championing expensive proposals to build bigger and shinier jails.

In Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Charmaine McGuffey won the Democratic primary for sheriff, ousting incumbent Jim Neil by a resounding margin: 70 percent to 30 percent.

The tense campaign centered on Hamilton County’s poor jail conditions, Neil’s ties to ICE, and the circumstances of McGuffey’s departure from Neil’s office in 2017.

“People want to embrace criminal justice reform,” McGuffey told the Appeal: Political Report when asked how she interprets her large win. “People are not embracing any more costs to incarceration. … People understand that now is the time for us to get our fiscal house in order, and, morally, to stop mass incarcerating people.”

When Neil first came into office in 2013, McGuffey, a longtime sheriff’s deputy, was promoted as jail director. She held that position until 2017. During that stretch, the sheriff’s office considerably improved the jail’s dismal compliance with state standards. But overcrowding, poor conditions, and allegations of police brutality remained big issues. 

Neil advocates building a new jail as a remedy to the current jail’s overcrowding.

But McGuffey opposed the construction of a new jail. “The solution to the problem of mass incarceration is certainly not more mass incarceration,” she reiterated to the Political Report on Wednesday.

It would enable local officials to look away from over-incarceration, she argues. “If there’s a new jail, [the sheriff doesn’t] have to pay attention to it, because now there’s enough room,” she told the Political Report in a March interview, in March. “And I don’t think that is a way to create reform.” 

She has proposed reducing arrests and pretrial detention for lower-level offenses, and said on Wednesday that, as sheriff, she “would continue doing what I was doing [as the jail director], and that means bringing real life opportunities to people who are inside our jails… so that they’re not coming right back to our door the moment we open it and let them out.” She added, “There are other ways for us to enforce laws and move people along to deal with addiction, to deal with mental health issues, to deal with homelessness, and we need to work on providing those services.”

In 2017, McGuffey faced an investigatation for fostering a hostile work environment; she declined a demotion, and was fired. She claimed that the investigation was retaliation because she had raised red flags about use of force in the jail. She filed a lawsuit, and an internal report found that she had indeed recommended that an officer be fired over excessive use of force. 

She now says that ensuring accountability for use of force would be “at the top” of her priorities, though she argues that there are many circumstances where use of force is justified. “When we have situations of prisoners or people being seriously injured without the justification for those kinds of injuries,” she said, “we are going to have a process by which we evaluate those things. We’re not going to turn our head, we’re not going to sweep things under the rug.”

If McGuffey wins the general election, she would return to the office from which she was fired, this time as its elected leader. 

She will face police Lt. Bruce Hoffbauer, who secured the GOP nomination unopposed, in November. Hamilton County has shifted toward Democrats, but the race could be competitive.

Immigration also loomed large over this sheriff’s primary. Neil has long faced protests against his relationship with ICE. He honors ICE’s warrantless requests (detainers), which enable the agency to continue detaining certain people at the local jail beyond their scheduled release. 

McGuffey told the Political Report in March that she would no longer honor detainers if elected.

She is the latest in a recent string of sheriff’s candidates who have ousted incumbents on promises to restrict cooperation with the federal agency.

Neil also drew the ire of local Democrats in 2016 when he attended a rally for Donald Trump. McGuffey clinched the endorsement of Hamilton County’s Democratic Party in January.

Originally scheduled for March 17, the primary was delayed until April 28 due to concerns over the novel coronavirus.

The pandemic also changed county officials’ approach to incarceration. In March, the county authorized Neil to release some people who could not afford to make bond, and the sheriff has touted a lower population as a way to fight COVID-19. 

McGuffey points to those emergency moves as evidence that the county can implement longer-term decarceral measures. 

“It proves the point I’ve been making,” she told the Political Report. “These people can be released from jail without the world falling apart around us, without making us any less safe. We can safely release people from jail, and we are doing it now. I want people to take a look at this model that is being forced upon us, and build upon it in positive ways.” 

She added, “It is forcing people to realize exactly what people on the front lines of the reform initiatives have been saying all along.”

Local advocates have indeed argued long before COVID-19 that Hamilton County should reduce its jail population, and that overcrowding threatens public health. 

“We don’t want another jail, because you have people who are just sitting here who need the chance to get out,” Chazidy Bowman, a local activist, told the Political Report in March. Paul Graham, executive director of the AMOS Project, a local justice nonprofit, emphasized that many people are arrested in the first place.

“We don’t need to use [a new jail] to warehouse people,” Graham said. “We can’t incarcerate our way out of social services problems.” 

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A similar debate has raged an hour north of Cincinnati, in Greene County.

Here too, local jails are overcrowded and in poor conditions. Here too, the sheriff, Republican Gene Fisher, has championed the remedy of building a bigger jail, with room to detain many more people. Local officials endorsed a plan to increase the county’s detention capacity by 30 percent.

On Tuesday, though, voters overwhelmingly rejected a sales tax increase that would have funded the construction of this new jail.

Greene County Citizens Against Giant Jail Tax, a local political committee, campaigned against the proposal, objecting to pouring money into carceral policies instead of alternatives. “Opioids, homelessness, family violence — taking our social problems and dumping them into the jail doesn’t work,” Pat Dewees, a member of that group, told the Xenia Daily Gazette in March. 

Bomani Moyenda, another organizer, echoes this message. “There are a dozen things they could do to reduce the jail population,” he told the Political Report on Wednesday. “They could come up with some pretrial justice services, diversion programs. They could cite people instead of taking people to jail for minor offenses.”

Ohio also held other elections with stakes for criminal justice reform on Tuesday. Former judge Fanon Rucker won the Democratic nomination to be Hamilton County’s prosecuting attorney; he will face Republican incumbent Joseph Deters in November. Deters is a proponent of the death penalty, while Rucker says he would not seek death sentences. In Ashtabula County, meanwhile, former judge Colleen Mary O’Toole secured the Republican nomination to challenge Prosecuting Attorney Cecilia Cooper, a Democrat. O’Toole told the Political Report in January that the opioid crisis expanded the space for criminal justice reform, and amplified the need to “shift away from incarceration.”   

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For Ohio activists who promote decarceration as a better answer to jail overcrowding than building bigger and newer jails, Los Angeles County may prove a budding success story.

Los Angeles officials planned on building a new jail through a $1.7 billion contract, but faced with local pressure they scrapped the idea in August. Then, in March, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that directed a local commission to devise a plan to reduce the jail population and reinvest the savings into community services. 

Kate Levescont, treasurer of the Greene County Citizens Against Giant Jail Tax, says that a “silver lining to the COVID-19 crisis” may be to jumpstart such conversations in Ohio. “It is perhaps an opportune moment to think about ways to minimize the jail population and make those less expensive investments in diversionary approaches,” she said.

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Update: Charmaine McGuffey won this primary, after it was rescheduled to April 28 after the novel coronavirus outbreak.

In southwest Ohio’s Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati, a tense Democratic primary between the incumbent sheriff and his former jail director could usher in change for jail conditions. 

Results could signal whether voters want to keep county officials focused on reducing the jail population, a goal that is advancing around the country. 

Against the backdrop of lawsuits and activist complaints about the local jail, Sheriff Jim Neil and his challenger Charmaine McGuffey differ on key issues that affect the number of incarcerated persons. Among them are whether it’s best to address overcrowding by building a new jail or by pursuing decarceral policies, and whether the jail should continue detaining people when ICE asks it to. 

Paul Graham, executive director of the AMOS Project, a local justice nonprofit, believes the election may bring Hamilton County closer to a “vision of policing” that shuns “overpolicing, overarresting, overincarcerating.”

Neil and McGuffey both worked for the sheriff’s office for decades. In 2013, Neil became the county’s first Democratic sheriff in nearly 40 years. He put McGuffey in charge of running the county jail.

That same year, an audit from the state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction found that the main county jail, the Hamilton County Justice Center, was failing 48 out of 69 standards, in part because of overcrowding. The inspector referred to the facility as Ohio’s worst jail. By 2016, a new audit found the jail to be compliant with all “essential standards.” 

Both candidates take credit for the changes, though advocates say conditions inside the jail continue to be poor. 

When she became jail director, a position she held until 2017, McGuffey undertook initiatives to connect people to social service agencies focusing on addiction, mental health, and reintegration upon release. She points to this as proof of the rehabilitative direction she intends to chart if given more power inside the jail as sheriff. 

McGuffey says overcrowding was one of the biggest issues, so her department began collaborating with judges to reduce the amount of time people had to spend in the jail. “We started a dialogue with [the judges] asking them to look at their dockets of prisoners and find ways to help us get these prisoners released and move on,” she told The Appeal: Political Report. She added that the jail would occasionally release low-level offenders who were being held on high bonds.

Neil did not respond to requests for comment. David Daughtry, a spokesperson for the jail, said the department had used such methods even before McGuffey was promoted to major, though largely to address particular “spikes” in the jail population. 

Overcrowding remains a serious problem in Hamilton County, however. In 2017, a class-action lawsuit alleged that people were held in poor conditions with little space, and forced to sleep on the floor in a “plastic, casket-like shell.” The sheriff’s department has also faced allegations of brutality inside the jail. The county committed to detention caps in a 2018 settlement. 

Neil declared a “state of emergency” in 2017 and moved some incarcerated people to a jail in a neighboring county. Recent estimates still put the Justice Center’s average daily population at about 1,400 people, still well above its capacity.

Neil now calls for building a new jail in Hamilton County to address these issues.

This has set up a conflict in the sheriff’s race over whether to prioritize chasing and building more space to detain people, or whether to reduce the number of people detained.

Advocates have said for decades that building new or more expansive jails encourages punitive policing instead of forcing law enforcement to pursue humane, decarceral solutions. 

“We don’t need to use [a new jail] to warehouse people,” said Graham. “We can’t incarcerate our way out of social services problems.”

Cincinnati itself is proof of how reforms can eliminate the need for new jails. As previously noted in The Appeal, when the city’s Queensgate Correctional Facility closed in 2008, the number of jail beds in Cincinnati dropped from roughly 2,300 to 1,500. And in the following years, violent crime and property crime continued to decline significantly, as did felony and misdemeanor arrests. Robin S. Engel, a University of Cincinnati criminologist closure, found that the closure was followed by changes in the Cincinnati Police Department’s practices, including not arresting people over minor violations, and partnering with communities to implement strategies of focused deterrence. The police had to think of arrests “as a limited commodity rather than as a standard response,” Engel writes in the study, which was published in 2017.

Neil has given no indication that he intends to change the way that his department polices or approaches arrests. The sheriff’s department polices some townships and municipalities around Cincinnati, a common arrangement. 

Instead, in 2018, with the jail well exceeding its capacity, Neil announced that he was exploring plans to reopen Queensgate. In recent interviews with the Cincinnati Enquirer’s editorial board, Neil confirmed that he would support an additional jail. 

McGuffey has made clear that she would not. She told The Appeal that Neil believes that “if there’s a new jail [he doesn’t] have to pay attention to it, because now there’s enough room. And I don’t think that is a way to create reform.” 

She said that she would prefer to implement decarceral alternatives, such as working to end cash bail for low-level offenses and making sure that people aren’t getting arrested for minor infractions. As one way of ensuring the latter, she is suggesting that the court system is changed so people aren’t issued warrants for being late for a hearing. 

Criminal justice reform advocates have pushed for bail changes in Hamilton County. 

“We don’t want another jail, because you have people who are just sitting here who need the chance to get out,” Chazidy Bowman, a local reform activist, told the Political Report . 

Advocates in Hamilton also point out that Neil has been a no-show at the four candidate forums held by the AMOS Project. Neil “campaigns now on experience, not on being a reformer,” said Graham. 

Bowman says she was heartened not only by McGuffey’s presence, but by commitments she made to rethink the system. “She has told us [bail reform] is one of her main focuses, she understands why it’s important, and agreeing that we need it,” Bowman said. 

Daughtry replies that Neil is making reforms as he can. In January, Neil instituted a program in which female prisoners could get three days off their sentence for each day they worked for Sweet Cheeks Diaper Bank, a local nonprofit. Neil has also supported efforts to provide medication-assisted treatment to people with substance use issues. 

“That’s his way of criminal justice reform,” said Daughtry. “It’s very hard for a sheriff to make these changes, because as sheriff and sheriff’s deputy our role is to enforce the law, not legislate the law.” 

Hanging over the race are accusations of misconduct. In 2010, McGuffey was charged with disorderly conduct and public intoxication, though charges were later dropped. She says she was coming out of a gay bar, and that this incident involved anti-gay bias.

In 2017, after facing an internal investigation for creating a hostile work environment, McGuffey declined a lower-paying position and was fired. McGuffey has sued over the circumstances of her departure. She has said the investigation against her was in retaliation over her raising questions about use-of-force incidents inside the jail. 

An internal report confirmed that McGuffey had recommended the firing of a sheriff’s deputy for using excessive force against an incarcerated person. Neil and the sheriff’s department have denied that this was related to McGuffey’s demotion.

Whoever wins the primary on Tuesday will face police Lt. Bruce Hoffbauer, the Republican candidate, in the November general election. 

McGuffey was endorsed by the Hamilton County Democratic Party in January. The nominating committee’s endorsement of McGuffey was significant because political parties traditionally endorse an incumbent. 

Many in the party—particularly those on its nominating committee—remain outraged by Neil’s attendance at a 2016 rally for Donald Trump (he later apologized for going), as well as by his policies surrounding undocumented immigrants. 

Neil’s department honors ICE detainer requests, the county jail confirmed to the Political Report. This means that, should ICE request it, the jail will agree to detain someone beyond their scheduled release on suspicions that they are undocumented, giving the federal agency time to apprehend the person. Detainers are administrative requests that are not signed by a judge, and the ACLU of Ohio has argued that enforcing them violates people’s constitutional rights; some sheriffs around the country do not honor them.

McGuffey told the Political Report that she will end the policy should she be elected.

Local activists have protested the sheriff’s department over its ties to ICE. Daughtry strongly denies that the department unduly cooperate with the federal agency. “If they don’t pick [undocumented immigrants] up we let them go,” he said of the aftermath of an ICE detainer. The department sends the fingerprints of people booked in the jail to a federal database as part of the Secure Communities program; Daughtry says there are no other streams of notification. “We do not support, we do not work with ICE,” he added.

McGuffey would not commit to a particular policy beyond ending detainers, though she stressed that she wants to discuss these issues with local activists. “I’m going to follow the law as I am bound to do as the sworn sheriff,” she said. “However there are nuances in our policies and procedures in the jail that give us some room to make decisions that will prevent families from being broken apart.”  

For activists in Hamilton County, the conversations that arise because of  the primary are a chance to find more receptive ears for jail issues they have long worked on. 

“I believe this is how we’ll win bail reform and have a real shift in the criminal justice system,” Graham said.

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