Additional time sought to change Oakhill trial venue

CLEVELAND — Attorneys for two defendants in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal conspiracy case want more time to prepare arguments that the trial shouldn’t be in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court because they haven’t had adequate time to review hundreds of hours of secretly

recorded conversations that prosecutors plan to use as evidence.

Also, the attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino wrote in a motion that prosecutors have yet to provide additional secret recordings they have, thus making it impossible to raise the question of the court’s jurisdiction.

Lynn Maro, McNally’s attorney, and John B. Juhasz, who represents Sciortino, wrote in the motion — filed electronically with the court at 7:35 p.m. Saturday, with an identical document filed the same way at 4:24 p.m. today — that prosecutors have provided 354 recordings, a “vast majority” are one to two hours long, and “because of location and background noise,” the tapes “are not easy to listen to.”

Prosecutors wrote in a motion in October that it had 700 hours of secretly recorded conversations made between Oct. 18, 2005, and Aug. 6, 2010.

The two defense attorneys contend in their motion if they did nothing but work seven hours a day listening to the tapes every day since Oct. 16, when they were received, they couldn’t have listened to them all by today, the deadline to challenge the jurisdiction of the court.

“Given counsels’ other caseload, this was not possible,” they wrote.

For the complete story, read Tuesday's Vindicator and Vindy.com