Saturday, January 30, 2016
CLEVELAND
Defense attorneys in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption case have filed a third motion in less than two weeks seeking to get the indictment dismissed.
“This case is simply now about political payback, it is about people who cannot stand to be in the presence of one another, and the case is about efforts to hurt one another at all costs – with the costs of the predators being an astronomical expenditure of taxpayer dollars,” wrote the attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and ex-Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino, two of the case’s three defendants.
The motion, filed Friday, accuses Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul J. Gains and his staff of “prosecutorial misconduct” and requests a hearing to get the judge overseeing this trial to dismiss the indictment.
If the judge won’t dismiss, the attorneys – Lynn Maro for McNally and John B. Juhasz for Sciortino – are asking Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court to suppress “all evidence and documentation garnered by any investigation person or agency prior to May 14, 2014,” the day of the indictment.
They also want to bar any current or former Mahoning County prosecutor employees from testifying in the case, which is to begin Feb. 29.
The motion specifically mentions Gains; Linette Stratford, his chief assistant prosecutor; and Samantha Pyatt, a Columbus attorney who was a legal intern at the Mahoning prosecutor’s office who organized files for the Oakhill case, who are on the prosecutor’s witness list.
The filing accuses the prosecutor’s office of representing McNally, a former county commissioner, and Sciortino, when he was auditor, and then improperly provided evidence to special prosecutors to investigate them.
Gains said the accusations are “absolutely not true.”
Gains said his office “only represents these people in their official capacity and not as individuals.”
Gains pointed to a Sept. 20, 2012, Ohio Supreme Court case that had an attorney who represents Anthony Cafaro Sr., a retired businessman who is an unindicted member of an alleged Oakhill criminal enterprise, question if records between Gains and officeholders are subject to “attorney-client privilege.”
In that decision, the court ruled that a “review of the sealed records here establishes that the records have everything to do with the criminal cases and nothing to do with” any “assertions of prosecutorial misconduct.”
Dan Tierney, spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting this case with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, also mentioned the Supreme Court decision.
“That addressed these same concerns, and [the court] did not find misconduct as alleged,” he said.
In addition to this filing, Maro filed a motion to dismiss charges Wednesday. She contends that when McNally signed an agreement in September 2007, after the resolution of a civil case involving the county’s purchase of Oakhill, that it was agreed that “none of the parties of this agreement will solicit or intentionally persuade any individual to initiate any legal action.”
Also on Jan. 17, Maro and Juhasz filed a motion to dismiss the charges contending the proper authority to indict their clients in Cuyahoga County was not obtained. Prosecutors responded to that motion Thursday, calling it “meritless.”
McNally and Sciortino, both Democrats, and attorney Martin Yavorcik, a failed 2008 independent Mahoning County prosecutor candidate who lost to Gains, are accused of being part of a criminal enterprise.
The enterprise supposedly 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.
Friday’s filing accuses “Gains and his staff” of acting as lawyers for McNally and Sciortino, then investigated “their own clients,” and worked closely with special prosecutors investigating alleged criminal behavior by the two officeholders.
Gains said his office isn’t the personal law firm for elected officials and didn’t do anything improper.
The defense attorney’s filing states Pyatt, as a Mahoning County prosecutor intern, organized files associated with the Oakhill case.
The motion points to Pyatt’s LinkedIn profile in which she wrote that during her time at the prosecutor’s office she “prepared summaries of evidence, including [a] 400-page timeline” involving a “major public corruption” case, meaning Oakhill.