Miscues and oversights help assure that justice is blind

Vindicator Editorial: July 13, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

Something is wrong with the administration of justice in Mahoning County.

Increasingly, it seems, we just can’t get it right.

The prosecution of an accused baby killer is jeopardized because an appeals court finds that he was not given a Miranda warning, which has been a standard part of questioning for more than 40 years. The guilty plea of a 13-time drunken driver was thrown out by the appeals court, which found that his indictment was technically flawed. Aggravated murder charges against a Youngstown man were thrown out in Summit County Common Pleas Court after it was revealed that crucial evidence in the possession of the Youngstown Police Department had been compromised. Someone among a group of high school students sparked a fire that did $14 million damage to the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, but no one is going to get more than a slap on the wrist.

These aren’t cases of people getting away with moppery with intent to gawk. Were dealing with murder and mayhem — taking lives and endangering lives — in cases that would not appear to present particular challenges to the orderly and successful prosecution of the criminals.

The cases

Here’s a recap of the cases we’ve mentioned.

Terrance Tate has been jailed for more than two years on an aggravated murder charge, accused of beating Javonte Covington to death on the child’s first birthday. But the 7th District Court of Appeals has ruled police improperly failed to warn Tate of his right to remain silent before questioning him. The Miranda ruling was established by the Supreme Court in 1966 and emphatically reasserted as recently as 2000 by a far more conservative court. It is no secret that police must advise a suspect in custody that he has the right to silence or a lawyer. The prosecutor’s office is appealing the 7th District ruling, but has acknowledged that if the appeal fails, it is unlikely that there is sufficient evidence to convict Tate.

Randy H. Bragwell, one of the state’s most notorious drunken drivers, was facing his 13th DUI prosecution in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. The most amazing thing is that at 13, he is not the state’s worst offender. The second most amazing thing about Bragwell is that after he pleaded guilty to his 13th DUI, his case was successfully appealed on the grounds that the repeat-offender specification in the indictment was flawed. It didn’t include the required mention of five or more drunken-driving convictions within the previous 20 years. Happily, Bragwell saved everyone a lot of extra time by waiving a reindictment by the grand jury and pleading guilty. The prosecution and defense agreed to the same six-year sentence Judge Scott Krichbaum imposed in 2006. Bragwell’s cooperation may be tied to the fact that he’s already serving time for his 12th DUI conviction and he had little to gain by dragging out the adjudication of unlucky number 13.

Summit County Common Pleas Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove has ordered an investigation into what she has described as the “bungling of a major homicide investigation,” at best, or a possible “deliberate intent to commit a fraud” on the court for the purpose of convicting Arian S. O’Connor. O’Connor had been arrested by Akron police in 2007 for the murder of Javan Rogers of Akron five years earlier. Rogers body was found in Youngstown, along with a shell casing that investigators eventually linked to O’Connor. But the chain of evidence between that shell casing and another was broken, a fact that did not come to light until the day before O’Connor’s trial was to begin. The result: dismissal of the charges and a murder unprosecuted.

And finally, there is the case of the fire at the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center that resulted in $14 million in damage and endangered the lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of students. The May 4, 2007, fire obviously began with the ignition of volatile chemicals used in an art room. Two students were found to have lied about events leading up to the fire, and yet the maximum penalty anyone will face in this case is 90 days confinement in the juvenile detention center. “The magistrate is mindful of the magnitude of the damage done by this fire. However, the magnitude of the damage does not serve to lessen the burden of proof — a burden clearly not met,” wrote Richard White, the magistrate in Mahoning County Juvenile Court, about his decision to find an 18-year-old Salem woman innocent of a felony charge of aggravated arson. She was found guilty of obstructing official business, a misdemeanor, and will be sentenced next month.

White could be right. Perhaps a couple of teenagers outsmarted police and arson investigators. Or perhaps their defense attorney was that much better than the prosecutor. Or perhaps White got caught up in weighing arcane evidence about whether certain chemical vapors rise or fall and whether a cigarette lighter a girl was holding over a bucket was close enough to spark a fire. Regardless of who dropped the ball, that $14 million fire didn’t start itself and no one — no one — is going to pay the price for the damage it did to the school or the effect the fire had on the lives of innocent students.

The people lose

No system is perfect, the legal system is more complicated than most and anyone can make a mistakes. But three of these cases — all in a relatively short period of time and all in one medium-sized county in Ohio — represent travesties of justice. The fourth case, that of drunken driver Randy Bragwell, reflects momentary sloppiness on the local level coupled with years of inattention in other jurisdictions that allowed this man to continue to be free and to continue to drink and drive.

Regardless of who is at fault — and we’re reasonably sure that everyone involved will say “not me,” the people deserve better.