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Defense attorneys in Oakhill case filed 15 motions to not allow prosecutors to use exhibits during the trial
16 motions filed Monday; 1 seeks to dismiss all counts but perjury
CLEVELAND
Attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and ex-Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino filed 15 motions asking the judge overseeing the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption trial to not permit prosecutors to use certain exhibits as evidence in the upcoming trial.
The attorneys for two of the three defendants also filed a motion asking the judge to extend the deadline to file pretrial motions regarding a key witness, Youngstown political consultant Harry Strabala, whose secret recordings are part of the prosecutors’ evidence. The filing didn’t include a length of the requested extension.
“The defendants may wish to file challenges to evidence based” upon “possible violations of Department of Justice guidelines, and possible violations of state law,” they wrote.
All 16 of the motions were filed Monday by Lynn Maro and John B. Juhasz, the attorneys for McNally and Sciortino, respectively.
The attorneys wrote that they needed the extension because they didn’t learn until this weekend that Strabala – called CHS1 (Confidential Human Source) in the filing – “is not someone who was working for the FBI to avoid prosecution or punishment.”
Instead, they wrote that he “is and has been a paid informant working for the FBI.”
“Under no time has Harry Strabala been investigated by the FBI,” said Todd Werth, supervisory special agent at the FBI’s Boardman office. “He’s never been a subject of any of our cases.”
It was publicly revealed during an Oct. 16 hearing that Strabala was an informant who secretly taped politicians at the request of the FBI.
The defendants may need time to file a challenge to possible evidence from Stabala, who wasn’t listed as a prosecutors’ witness until last Wednesday, and the court motion isn’t an attempt to delay the trial, Maro and Juhasz wrote.
“The requested order is necessary to enforce the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of due process of law and the effective assistance of counsel,” they wrote.
The trial is scheduled to start Feb. 29.
The only recent motion filed by Martin Yavorcik, a failed 2008 Mahoning County independent prosecutor candidate and Oakhill’s third defendant, was to dismiss his attorney, Mark Lavelle, and defend himself.
Maro and Juhasz filed 16 motions, one also sought to dismiss all counts but perjury against the two, on Monday. The motion to dismiss all but perjury seeks to suppress sworn depositions from Sciortino and McNally from civil cases in 2007 and 2008.
Among the motions filed Monday, the two requested Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, who is overseeing the trial, to prohibit prosecutors from using certain exhibits during their opening statements.
Some of the more than 100 items “questionable” include depositions of McNally, Sciortino and Anthony Cafaro, the retired head of his family’s Cafaro Co. real-estate development business, and some key prosecutors witnesses, Maro and Juhasz wrote.
“The point is that what the state purports to use in opening statement is not evidence likely later to be admitted, but hearsay, opinion, speculation, and even entrapment,” the two attorneys wrote.
A May 14, 2014, indictment and subsequent court filings accuse McNally, Sciortino, Yavorcik and Cafaro of being part of a criminal enterprise that conspired to stop or impede the relocation of a Mahoning County agency from a building owned by a Cafaro Co. subsidiary to Oakhill, the former Forum Health Southside Hospital owned by the county.
Cafaro hasn’t been indicted.
The other three have pleaded not guilty to 53 counts including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, conspiracy, bribery, perjury, money laundering and tampering with records.
Maro and Juhasz also sought to prohibit the use of exhibits they say “have no relevance to the proceedings at hand or to the charges coming on for trial” or are protected by “attorney-client privilege.”
Those exhibits include summaries of Cafaro’s handwritten notes of meetings with McNally, Sciortino and others named as unindicted co-conspirators in the alleged criminal enterprise; summaries of Yavorcik’s cell phone call records in 2008; exhibits gathered during a similar 2010 indictment in Mahoning County that was dismissed a year later with the right to indict again; and correspondence between attorneys involved in this case.
“We will respond in court, but the prosecutors feel the evidence referenced is relevant to the case,” said Dan Tierney, spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.