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No Oakhill trial date yet set
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Sciortino
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McNally
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Yavorcik
CLEVELAND
There’s still no trial date set for the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal conspiracy case, which was indicted in May in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
The defendants are Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino; Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally, who is a lawyer and former county commissioner; and Atty. Martin Yavorcik, an unsuccessful candidate for county prosecutor in 2008.
The indictment against the three men, dismissed in Mahoning County in 2011 and refiled this year in Cleveland, alleges a conspiracy to impede the move of the Mahoning County Department of Job and Family Services from then-Cafaro Co.-owned rented quarters at Garland Plaza on Youngstown’s East Side to Oakhill Renissance Place.
Oakhill is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center, which Mahoning County bought in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 2006 and to which JFS moved in 2007.
Monday’s pretrial hearing before Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court consisted mostly of discussions regarding discovery, which is the pretrial exchange of evidence between the prosecution and defense, said Dan Tierney, a spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting the Oakhill case.
The next pretrial hearing in the case will be Sept. 15.
As ordered by the judge, the attorney general’s office has corrected grammatical errors in the indictment, Tierney said.
Many of those errors were in quotes from writings or recorded comments attributed to the defendants and others, and those were noted, as necessary, where they are quoted verbatim in the indictment, Tierney said.
Monday’s pretrial hearing followed last week’s filing by the attorney general’s office at the Ohio Supreme Court of a request for a writ of mandamus to compel a panel of three retired judges considering suspending Sciortino from office to follow the procedure prescribed by state law.
State law says Sciortino’s lawyer, John B, Juhasz, may appear with Sciortino at the suspension hearing, but Juhasz may not advocate for Sciortino, present evidence or examine or cross-examine witnesses.
The panel ruled that, as a matter of due process, Juhasz may fully participate in the hearing as Sciortino’s legal representative.
Because of the Oakhill indictment, in which Sciortino faces 16 felony counts, Attorney General Michael DeWine is seeking Sciortino’s swift suspension from office.
Sciortino, who is a lawyer, remains on the Nov. 4 ballot as the Democratic candidate for re-election, now challenged by a newly designated Republican candidate, Ralph T. Meacham of Lake Milton, who is a certified public accountant.