Bill Mason’s Mean Machine
Cleveland Scene
Charu Gupta and James Renner
10/22/2008
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor, Bill Mason, has had years to address the racial disparity in drug laws. Meaningful action is overdue.
Mona Lynch is a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. Earlier this year, she studied aspects of Cuyahoga County’s criminal-justice system as part of the ACLU’s national project on racial disparities in drug arrests. At Scene’s request, Lynch also read the
2005 report. She found Mason and JSR’s inattention to open discovery surprising.“It would have been very low cost to implement,” says Lynch, “and perhaps provided some cost savings as well. There are important justice and efficiency reasons to have open discovery.”
In September, a new committee headed by Judge Friedman proposed another course: Within one week of the first pretrial conference, prosecutors would give defense counsel a “discovery packet” containing all police reports, statements and criminal records of defendants, witnesses names and addresses, and any lab and hospital reports. Prosecutors could decide to redact any information in any of these documents they deemed sensitive. Defense attorneys could still ask a judge to unmask it, after showing “good cause.”
That’s still not enough prosecutorial advantage for Mason.
A few weeks ago, Mason told Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett – who’s been flogging the prosecutor over open discovery – that he’s “not against open discovery” and is working with the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association on a statewide proposition.
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In 2000, Human Rights Watch documented just how disproportionately the so-called war on drugs targets African Americans. At that time in Ohio, blacks made up 11 percent of the general population but 70 percent of the prison population. Most were locked up on drug-related charges.
In early 2002, the Rev. Marvin McMickle got to see why. The pastor of Antioch Baptist Church and civil-rights activist spent four months serving as foreman of a Cuyahoga County grand jury, the body that issues felony indictments. He left a troubled man. A majority of the defendants accused of low-level drug felonies were black Clevelanders – and most were addicts, not dealers.
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“If you get a [fifth-degree] felony at age 20,” McMickle told Scene this July, “then 20 years later you’re still a felon and maybe you’re having a hard time taking care of your family, right? That just perpetuates this cycle.” McMickle and the pastors wanted to know: Would Mason tackle the random police sweeps and subsequent charging decisions that were putting so many black Clevelanders on the path of felony convictions?
According to a 2002 Plain Dealer article, Mason promised back then to look for ways to reduce the number of minor drug-possession arrests (dubbed “crack-pipe cases”) being charged as felonies. He would go into the community and meet with police officers and municipal judges who were sending these cases to his office and try to find a systematic solution to the pastors’ and NAACP’s concerns.
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The number of Cleveland’s felony drug-possession arrests has remained steady – 5,500 a year since 2003, nearly 70 percent of the county’s total – according to statistics compiled by local and federal agencies.
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Former county judge Peggy Foley Jones, who served until 2005, says Mason’s office seldom reduces charges before trial. “That’s what’s clogging up the system,” she says. “You try a crack pipe case for two days.” While many such cases are settled during trial, the snowball of court time and costs has already been set in motion.
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For the last several years, annual grand jury costs for jurors, court personnel and prosecutors have totaled nearly $1.5 million.
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Citizens for a Safe and Fair Cleveland was formed in early 2007 to focus on the impact of law enforcement, judicial equity and community relations.
James Hardiman, CSFC’S co-chairman and first vice president of the Cleveland NAACP, has called low-level drug arrests charged as felonies “a crisis in our community.”Earlier this year, CSFC partnered with the ACLU, which was already looking at racial disparities in sentencing and drug arrests nationwide. The ACLU has focused on Cuyahoga County, with research conducted by Mona Lynch, the criminology professor from UC, Irvine. Lynch’s conclusions were released in July and titled, “Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County.”
Lynch scrutinized grand jury reports and demographic data to document what many had long suspected: There is a racial – or at least a geographic – disparity in how the county prosecutes drug cases. Cleveland drug suspects are more likely to be charged with felonies in county courts, while suburban counterparts usually face only misdemeanors in municipal courts.[...]
Peggy Foley Jones, a Republican, served on the bench for 14 years until losing to Peter Corrigan, a candidate backed by Mason in the 2004 election.
(Of the five separate bar associations that make up the Judicial Candidates Rating Coalition, three ranked Jones as “excellent” and two reviewed her as “good” in 2004. All five rated Corrigan “good.”) Jones says that many sitting judges find at least an appearance of impropriety in Mason’s political behavior. “Mason is in a powerful position in the county Democratic party,” she says. “He [influences] who gets endorsements, who gets to run. So that affects judges’ thoughts, even if it’s just a perception.”[...]
“Mason is at the heart of county Democratic politics,” says Chris Link, the executive director of Cleveland’s ACLU. “That isn’t a good thing because you then don’t really have an independent prosecutor. It’s very difficult to be critical of people in your own party.”
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After news reports revealed his refusal to debate his opponent at the City Club – he hadn’t even responded – Mason finally agreed, and he and Annette Butler met there on Monday.
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She brought up recent media coverage of racial disparity in crack-pipe cases, and two questions from the audience dealt with the issue. Oddly, Mason’s response seemed to suggest that the problem was news to him. “I find it disconcerting to all of us involved in the justice system. I will say
this: I will go out and I will ask for funding to look at this issue very strongly, to have it analyzed.”He neglected to mention the studies that have already confirmed the disparity or the fact that local community leaders brought it to his attention six years ago.