Man sentenced for faking hate crime

AUSTINTOWN -- Isaac Black Jr. has been sentenced to a weekend in jail and 27 days of electronically monitored house arrest for pretending to have been a victim of ethnic intimidation to get out of a lease.
Black, 29, of 256 Idlewood Drive, Youngstown, pleaded guilty to one count of falsification (lying on a police report), and one count of obstructing official business, both misdemeanors. He also will pay a $200 fine.
During the period of house arrest, he will be permitted to go to work, says the sentence imposed by Mahoning County Court Judge David D'Apolito.
The judge refused to accept an earlier plea bargain negotiated with Kenneth Cardinal, an assistant county prosecutor, which exchanged a guilty plea for a $100 fine and a letter of apology.
Black was required to distribute a letter of apology with Tuesday's sentence. In the letter, he said that he initially did not know his friends were behind the vandalism to his home, which included spray-painted racial slurs and a mutilated doll hung from the mailbox.
"The events which unfolded were, apparently, occasioned by a day of drinking, and I have only a faint remembrance of having had any conversation with my friends which would have caused them to commit these heinous acts.
"I do not believe that my friends intended the series of events which happened afterward but, unfortunately, this is what could [and has] occurred due to too much alcohol and not enough common sense," the letter reads in part.