Prosecutor must do his job; make adjustments when money is tight

Prosecutor must do his job; make adjustments when money is tight

Prosecutor Paul Gains seems to have let two alleged murderers free to prove a point. He wants more money. Making over $100,000 a year, he admitted that his office didn’t do its job when it repeatedly refused to turn over evidence in a murder case to the defense attorneys.

Because of Gains’ delay, two men sat in the county jail for two years at taxpayer expense, waiting for Gains to do his job. Gains agreed that on two occasions before letting the alleged killers walk, the judge warned the prosecutor to turn over the evidence. The prosecutor admitted that his office had had that evidence for over a year.

If that wasn’t bad enough, while Gains admitted not doing his job, he wasn’t apologetic; his explanation was aired on our local news stations. He had the gall to act like it was the taxpayers’ fault. “I told the commissioners that this type of thing would happen when you reduced my budget,” was Gain’s retort as he pointed out empty secretary desks. Hopefully, Mr. Gains doesn’t have secretaries practice law without a license.

It appears that he thinks that he is above having to turn something over himself. Maybe he considers complying with the law and orders of our judges to be “secretarial work” that is beneath him. None of that matters, because it was his decision to try to prove his point by dropping the ball on a murder case.

As a victim of a crime himself, you would think that he would have more compassion than that. You would hope Prosecutor Gains would have more ethics than that.

Despite our paying him good money to do a job, he is arrogant enough to think that we owe him more. He is to serve the taxpayer, not the other way around. With unemployment and cuts in services at an all time high, maybe he is the one who needs a dose of reality from the voters who pay his wages.

Thomas Cool, Boardman