Office aids in county cases
Attorney General Marc Dann started the unit to help
overloaded prosecutors.
COLUMBUS (AP) — One infant murder was enough to stretch thin the three-lawyer prosecutor’s office in tiny Gallia County on the Ohio River, in southwestern Ohio. So when it got another child killing case a month later, the office was desperate for help.
It turned to the Ohio attorney general’s office, which in the past year has expanded its Special Prosecutions Section into a $1 million operation, with six newly hired lawyers traveling the state tending to nearly 50 criminal cases.
The service is free to local governments.
Just as the Ohio public defender’s office provides legal help for indigent defendants, the attorney general’s office is stepping in for county prosecutors offices that are cash-strapped, overworked or faced with cases that pose a conflict of interest.
“We look at the unit as if it is the 89th county; we’re a small prosecutor’s office,” said attorney Zachary Swisher.
The attorney general’s office has largely specialized in civil cases, with state agencies and consumers its chief clients. Criminal work was limited to assisting local prosecutors on certain cases, such as death penalty or crimes against children.
But Attorney General Marc Dann, who is in his second year in office, has developed the unit to take over criminal trials from any county that needs help.
When stretched, counties sometimes pay prosecutors from other counties to take on cases. Now, they can bring in the attorney general’s office at no cost.
“A lot of the small counties, their budgets are very constricted,” said John Murphy of the Ohio Prosecutors Association. “A lot of them don’t have very much in the way of staff and if they get a couple of these big cases in a row, they will need help.”
The unit has cases from 24 counties that range from aggravated murder in Gallia County to breaking and entering in Summit County. Other cases involve assaults, sex crimes and hazing.
“The attorney general’s office has never had a focus on criminal trial work. There was never a reason for a county prosecutor to pick up the phone and call for help,” said attorney Paul Scarsella, who leads the section.
“As a prosecutor, this is the best docket I’ve ever had,” he said.
Scarsella wrote to county prosecutors last year that his staff was available to help, free of charge. He said the section has not turned down any county, though he is unsure how many cases the unit can take on before it, like the counties it is trying to assist, is burdened by its workload.
The most notable case the office has assisted with involved Ken Richey, a British citizen who spent two decades on death row and once came within an hour of being executed.
A federal appeals court overturned his conviction and sentence. Prosecutors last month agreed to a deal releasing Richey after 21 years in prison in exchange for his pleading no contest to charges connected to a house fire in 1986 that killed a 2-year-old girl.
Summit is the largest county using the attorney general’s office and likely the one with the biggest budget. But that hasn’t stopped it from handing over eight cases, the most of any county so far.
The Gallia County prosecutor’s office has three lawyers. The county gets its share of felony crime, with nearly 300 cases in 2007.
But it had never had a child murder — which is more difficult to prepare for and argue than other murders — until last September when a mother was accused of killing her 4-month-old son. Then about a month later, a man was arrested in the killing of a toddler.
The attorney general’s office is handling the second case.
“When I requested they step in on this one, we had another murder case coming up, an attempted murder, and two felonious assaults from shootings,” said Gallia County Prosecutor Jeff Adkins. “It would have been a chore.
“So, it was kind of nice of them to offer,” he said. “It really helps out a lot of small counties.”