Defendant’s 13th DUI case to be re-indicted

By Peter H. Milliken

‘He’s back at square one if this gets re-indicted,’ the judge said.

YOUNGSTOWN — The prosecutor’s office has one more chance to get it right in Randy H. Bragwell’s 13th drunken-driving case, a judge said.

“If they don’t indict this guy this Thursday, I’m dismissing this bogus indictment,” Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court said of the Mahoning County grand jury.

“It’s our intention to present it to the grand jury this Thursday,” for re-indictment, J. Michael Thompson, assistant county prosecutor, told the judge in a Tuesday pretrial hearing.

Bragwell’s case returned to Judge Krichbaum after the 7th District Court of Appeals vacated Bragwell’s guilty plea to his 13th drunken-driving charge.

In August 2006, Judge Krichbaum sentenced the 54-year-old Akron man to six years in prison, fined him $5,000 and revoked his driver’s license for life.

The judge imposed that sentence after Bragwell pleaded guilty to the DUI offense with a repeat drunken-driving offender specification. The sentence consisted of three years for the DUI charge, plus three consecutive years for the specification. Sebring police arrested Bragwell on that charge March 28, 2006.

In its June 30 decision, the appeals court ruled that the repeat-offender specification in the indictment was flawed because it didn’t include the required mention of five or more drunken-driving convictions within the previous 20 years.

The appeals court also said Judge Krichbaum erred by not informing Bragwell before he pleaded guilty that his sentences for the DUI offense and the specification would have to be served consecutively.

After Bragwell’s lawyer, John P. Laczko, told the judge that Bragwell was serving a four-year prison term for his 12th DUI conviction, which was in Summit County, Judge Krichbaum ordered Bragwell held in Mahoning County Jail pending further action in the Mahoning County case.

Except for the latest case, which came out of Sebring, all of Bragwell’s DUI convictions have been in Summit and Portage counties, the first having been in January 1980 in Akron. The reason Bragwell hasn’t been sentenced to more prison time may be that he hasn’t hurt anyone, Thompson said after court. “DUI is a serious offense. It is a crime where he could potentially have hurt someone, but he’s very fortunate that he hasn’t,” Thompson said.

Considerably more prison time was imposed on James Cline of Geauga County, who went to prison for 38 years after his 12th DUI offense, in which two 18-year-old Hiram College students, Andrew Hopkins and Grace Chamberlain, died in March 2006 and a third student was seriously injured. Cline was driving a borrowed truck without a driver’s license when that accident occurred.

“He’s back at square one if this gets re-indicted,” Judge Krichbaum said of Bragwell.

If convicted, Bragwell would face one to five years in prison on his 13th DUI charge and one to five consecutive years on the repeat-offender specification, for a total potential sentence of two to 10 years, Thompson said.

“The indictment was absolutely, unequivocally improper. ... You folks need to improve your quality control on indictments,” Judge Krichbaum told Thompson, who said he did not draft the flawed indictment.

“The defense bar in Mahoning County ought to do something about it, too,” Judge Krichbaum added.

“It’s malpractice on the part of your office to present and prosecute an indictment that’s so bad,” Judge Krichbaum told Thompson.

“It couldn’t have been so glaring because he accepted the plea,” Paul J. Gains, Mahoning County prosecutor, said of Judge Krichbaum. “Obviously, we’re working toward correcting this — and it’s not going to happen again — and ensuring that this man still faces justice,” Gains added.