Reform and Consent
Cleveland Scene
Charu Gupta
10/22/2008
Ohio Supreme Court case filed by Bill Mason against a county judge trying to clean up the drug law racial disparity, may show that Mason has no intention of taking action.
In May 2003, a year after Mason’s meeting with the NAACP (see main story), Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Burt Griffin, a 30-year veteran of the bench, was getting ready to impanel a new grand jury. According to court documents (he declined to comment for this story), Griffin felt compelled to tackle the high volume of “crack pipe” felony indictments. He set aside the usual legal texts from which he read jury instructions, and wrote 10 pages of an original charge. Much of it was pro forma, but what Griffin said about crack pipe cases was unprecedented in Cuyahoga County.
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Finally, Griffin explained in great detail the controversy involving crack-pipe cases. Defendants caught with these could be charged with either possessing a drug abuse instrument – a misdemeanor – or drug possession and trafficking, a fourth- or fifth-degree felony (assuming crack residue is found on the pipe). He then told the grand jury about “differential prosecution,” and how other jurisdictions in Ohio often treat such cases as misdemeanors.
[...]In court documents filed later, Griffin explained that he was “trying to lay the foundation for possible policy reform” – the very thing Mason had pledged to do with black leaders 12 months earlier. He continued: “An honest exploration and development of the facts surrounding the apparent differential prosecution of crack-pipe cases in Cuyahoga County might lead both to a reduction of the burdens of minor drug prosecutions,” Griffin wrote to the court, “and to greater confidence by members of the African-American community in our criminal justice system.”
Mason was outraged. He called Griffin’s assessment “a bald allegation with no support of any kind,” and accused the judge of a “stunning … disdain for the prosecutor’s office,” according to affidavits and motions filed immediately against Griffin. The judge should be disqualified, Mason told the court, for harboring prejudice against prosecutors and for incorrectly instructing the jury to use a different burden of proof for crack-pipe cases. Such a statement, Mason wrote, “is an act to prevent the prosecution of felonies under Ohio law.”
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The matter was finally settled in Griffin’s favor when the court found no grounds for bias or prejudice. Griffin retired in 2005. Similar instructions have never again been issued by any judge.
Earlier this year, an ACLU study concluded that the racial disparity in Cleveland’s treatment of crack-pipe cases versus those in the suburbs was, in fact, real – far from a “bald allegation with no support of any kind.”