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Start of Oakhill trial to be reset
Judge: ‘June 6 is totally unworkable’
YOUNGSTOWN
The Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-conspiracy trial likely will have to be delayed several months beyond its initially scheduled June start date.
“The trial date of June 6 is totally unworkable,” said visiting Judge William H. Wolff Jr. of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
Judge Wolff, of Kettering, will preside over the trial. No new trial date has been scheduled.
The trial will have to be postponed because the special prosecutors’ delivery of their evidence to the defense lawyers isn’t finished, and it’s not clear when it will be, the judge said. The prosecutors delivered at least 56,000 pages of evidence to the defense late last year.
In the Oakhill criminal case, Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., former president of the Cafaro Co., the Cafaro Co. and two of its affiliates, and two current and two former county officials are charged with conspiring to impede the move of the county’s Department of Job and Family Services from Cafaro Co.-owned rented quarters to the county-owned Oak-hill building.
Oakhill is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center, which the county bought in 2006 and to which JFS moved the following year.
Judge Wolff, who conducted a 90-minute status hearing on the case Thursday afternoon, set a hearing for July 11 on two defense motions.
One is a motion already filed by lawyers for the Cafaro interests, seeking dismissal of the 73-count indictment because of alleged defects, including insufficient specificity concerning the criminal charges.
The other is a motion defense lawyers said they’d file, seeking dismissal of the indictment because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
In a separate public- records complaint at the Ohio Supreme Court, one of the Cafaro lawyers, John F. McCaffrey of Cleveland, alleged last week an improper working relationship between the staff of Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul J. Gains and the Oakhill special prosecutors.
That relationship developed despite Gains’ having asked the county common-pleas judges to appoint special prosecutors, who would be independent of his office, to “avoid any appearance of impropriety.”
McCaffrey alleged that “a shadow team of at least four members” of Gains’ staff “were involved in the grand jury investigation and ongoing prosecution.”