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Youngstown court purges records of crime suspects
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Criminal Supervisor, Doreene Carson, and Criminal Clerk, Mike Diana, stand alongside boxes of bench warrants, to be considered for dismissal by a judge, in the office of Sarah Brown-Clark, Clerk of Youngstown Municipal Court, Thursday Feb. 26, 2009.
About 2,000 bench warrants and attendant charges have been dismissed since June 2007.
STAFF REPORT
YOUNGSTOWN — About 500 people are about to get a free pass on criminal charges.
That’s because municipal court is purging cases of people who didn’t show up for court.
This applies to everyone charged with a misdemeanor before January 2006 or a felony before January 2003. After a review of the cases by the city prosecutor, there’s a chance the charges will be dismissed, along with the bench warrant for their arrests, also called a capias.
“Defendant failed to appear, capias to issue,” is the language judges use in court when they call a defendant’s name and he or she isn’t there. Men and women miss court appearances — arraignment, pretrial hearing, preliminary hearing, trial or sentencing — for a variety of reasons. Maybe they just don’t want to go, forgot, moved away, died or are incarcerated, said Doreene Carson, supervisor of the clerk of court’s criminal and traffic division.
Municipal Judge Robert P. Milich said that, aside from assessing a $60 capias fee when a defendant is arrested and brought to court, judges consider higher bonds for those who have a history of failing to appear.
City Prosecutor Jay Macejko said that, under most conditions, failure to appear is not a matter that can be addressed criminally, unless the person had been released on their own recognizance and failed to appear in court when scheduled. In that situation, the defendant can be charged with a misdemeanor or felony, depending on the original charge for which they failed to appear, he said.
Over the years, thousands of failure-to-appear capiases that weren’t served through arrests have accumulated in municipal court and the police index operator files, a situation that Macejko has been tackling. He provided the clerk’s office guidelines that coincide with the applicable Ohio statute of limitations as a starting point.
“Up for immediate consideration to be dismissed are misdemeanors older than two years and felonies older than six years,” Macejko said. “Any murders, felony offenses of violence, and certain misdemeanors will not be subject to a blanket dismissal but will, instead, be reviewed on a case-by-case basis before they are included in the motion to dismiss.”
Carson said that, since June 2007, roughly 2,000 failure-to-appear capiases and their attendant charges have been dismissed. She and Michael Diana, deputy criminal clerk, are preparing the next batch of files (two boxes that hold about 250 each) that Macejko will review before preparing a motion for a judge to dismiss the charges and capiases.
Carson said the batch she and Diana are putting together now will clean out the files for capiases under the guidelines established, except for a few stragglers. They expect Macejko’s review and a judge’s order to dismiss charges by the end of this month.
The process, they said, is ongoing and labor intensive.
Carson and Diana started the project by generating a computer list of cases between January 1985 and January 2006 in which defendants failed to appear, regardless of the crime alleged. They said the charges dismissed so far have mostly been misdemeanors — drug offenses, theft, driving under suspension, driving under the influence and so forth.
Macejko said reasonable efforts must be made to arrest those being sought.
Let’s say a person was charged with theft in 1992 and a capias was issued when the person failed to appear in court. Since then, if the person’s had no other contact with law enforcement, such as a traffic stop where the outstanding warrant would show up during a computer check of the person’s name, and the person still resides at the same address he or she did in 1992.
The passage of time, Macejko said, only worsens the state’s position for prosecution of an old charge. When considering whether to dismiss a charge or proceed with prosecution, a prosecutor must outline for a judge the efforts made to arrest the person and those efforts are then considered along with other factors, including the time between the warrant and apprehension, the availability of witnesses, the willfulness of the flight, and any prejudice to the state and/or defendant resulting from the delay, he said.
Carson said purging cases “that are going nowhere” because they’re so old is a time and cost saving measure for police, the clerk’s office and the courts. She said age of a case is a big factor.
Clerk of Court Sarah Brown-Clark said Macejko has been very aggressive in getting old capiases purged. Once that initiative is dealt with, they’ll move on to purging old warrants, she said.
Unlike capiases, warrants are issued by a judge after a law enforcement investigation — homicide, for example — and typically signed by a detective. The terms warrant, bench warrant and capias are often used interchangeably, even though they are different.