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Prosecutor says records still should not be sealed for former Bazetta police chief
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
An assistant Trumbull County prosecutor says Reggie Potts, the former Bazetta Township police chief fired after he was convicted of three offenses, is still not eligible for his criminal record to be sealed because his offenses were five years apart.
Diane Barber, assistant county prosecutor, filed a document in the case recently to respond to Potts’ motion, in which Potts said he is eligible and “has lived a law-abiding life” since his convictions.
Barber said Potts, of Howland, was convicted of felony theft in office in 1993 for a 1987 offense. He was convicted of misdemeanor falsification in 1993 for a misdemeanor falsification that occurred in 1989. And he was convicted of misdemeanor records tampering in 1994 for a 1991 offense.
Barber said Ohio law would allow Potts to have his records sealed only if all his offenses “are connected to the same act or result from offenses committed at the same time.”
Potts’ three offenses were not related to one another, and they involved Potts’ employment, Barber said.
Potts’ theft in office involved letting a friend borrow a car lent to the police department. The falsification was writing a letter indicating a man had worked for the Bazetta Police Department who had not. The records tampering related to police department drug records, according to documents.
Barber said there are nearly five years separating the three offenses, and they had nothing to do with each other.
But Matthew Williams of Cleveland, attorney for Potts, said in a filing Wednesday that the law is ambiguous and may not mean what Barber thinks it means.
He argued that “the ends of justice and the law are served by resolving the ambiguities within the statute ... in favor of the applicant [Potts].”
No hearings are schedule in the case, and Judge W. Wyatt McKay of common pleas court has not ruled on it.
Meanwhile, Judge McKay has ruled against the request of Carlisa Davis, 19, of Warren, to be released from prison after serving seven months of a 30-month sentence.
Davis was convicted of two counts of felony child endangering after her children, age 9 months and 21 months, had to be revived with the opiate-reversal drug naloxone after they became unresponsive.
Authorities said Davis never told authorities that the cause of their illness might be related to a drug overdose. She knew her brothers were selling drugs out of their mother’s house, and she saw one of the children playing in powder, a prosecutor said.