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An Oakhill defendant seeks to have charges dismissed
CLEVELAND
The attorney for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally, one of three defendants in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption case, has filed another motion seeking to dismiss charges against her client.
This time, attorney Lynn Maro wrote that McNally, when he was a Mahoning County commissioner, among others, signed an agreement in September 2007 after a civil case involving the county’s purchase of Oakhill.
“The agreement was a complete release of any issues and claims relating to Mahoning County civil litigation involving the purchase of Oakhill,” Maro wrote in a Tuesday filing.
Quoting the agreement, Maro wrote: “None of the parties of this agreement will solicit or intentionally persuade any individual to initiate any legal action against either any other party to this agreement or their respective employees and agents” related to Oakhill.
Maro wrote that county Prosecutor Paul J. Gains, who signed the “non-prosecution” agreement, cannot then seek to prosecute McNally, who also signed the document.
“Having made such an agreement, if a prosecutor breaches the promise of a non-prosecution, the court may grant the defendant’s request” to dismiss the indictment, Maro wrote.
Dan Tierney, spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, said, “This latest motion to dismiss is frivolous and meritless. This is another tactic to delay the start of this corruption trial.”
The AG’s office is prosecuting the case with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office.
Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, who is overseeing the trial, has rejected at least three other motions from the defendants attorneys to dismiss the case.
The trial is scheduled to start Feb. 29.
McNally, ex-Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino and Atty. Martin Yavorcik are accused of being part of a criminal enterprise that unsuccessfully tried to stop or impede the relocation of a Mahoning County agency from Garland Plaza, owned by a Cafaro Co. subsidiary, to Oakhill Renaissance Place, the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center owned by the county.
The three face 53 criminal counts including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, conspiracy, bribery, perjury, money laundering and tampering with records. They’ve pleaded not guilty.
On Thursday, Adam M. Chaloupka, a Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor, filed a response to a motion from Maro and John B. Juhasz, Sciortino’s attorney, from earlier in the month seeking to dismiss the case.
That motion contends the special prosecutor in the first Oakhill trial – that case was filed in July 2010 and dismissed 12 months later with the right to indict again – didn’t have the authority to have the attorney general and Cuyahoga County prosecutor offices take over the case.
That authority rests with the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, and no judge ever authorized the appointment of additional special prosecutors, they wrote in the motion to dismiss.
Chaloupka wrote that the court should deny the “meritless motion to dismiss because the entire basis for the motion rests on two fundamental misunderstandings” by defense attorneys.
The first is the attorneys incorrectly believe Cuyahoga County doesn’t have independent jurisdiction to indict regardless of what happened in Mahoning County, he wrote.
The second is AG attorneys aren’t “special” prosecutors as Maro and Juhasz contend, according to Chaloupka. Instead, he wrote, they are considered Cuyahoga County assistant “prosecuting” attorneys, and the county prosecutor has the authority to appoint them as such.