Complete acquittal in Antoine Tolbert/New Era Cleveland prosecution reveals shocking abuses of power by Cleveland Police Department and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office

With a few days having passed since the jury’s delivery of not guilty verdicts on all fifteen charges against all three defendants in the Antoine Tolbert/New Era Cleveland trial, it’s important to address and consider just what a shocking abuse of police and prosecutorial power that this case has exposed. While Ideastream’s Matt Richmond has published a report on the trial that’s about as comprehensive as one could expect from corporate-owned press these days, the extremely extraordinary nature of these proceedings merits further attention from the public for reasons we’ll briefly address here:

First, it’s important to note that it only took the Cleveland Police Department and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office six (6) days to arrest Tolbert—an acclaimed safe-streets advocate and activist who had recently received upwards of $200,000 in grants from local foundations and even the City itself for his New Era organization’s work— and charge him with felony “extortion,” after he had called for a boycott against some gas-station owners in Cleveland’s most violence-ridden neighborhoods due to legitimate concerns over community safety, and false accusations the gas-station owners made against Tolbert and his New Era Cleveland organization that they broadcast on a sensational Fox 8 news report.

In this Fox 8 report, which was published on August 8 of last year, an extremely dubious character named Rubin Swift—who has been convicted of at least 5 felonies, which does not include the time he was convicted and jailed in Pennsylvania for raping an 11-year-old child, a conviction that was, for mysterious and seemingly dubious reasons, somehow reversed years after the fact—was presented as an “owner” of one of the gas stations at issue, the Race Fuel on the corner of Lee Rd. and Harvard Ave. Swift is quoted front and center in this report claiming that “it was like Russia was taking over” the gas station, and that Tolbert and his group “held the gas station hostage” for three hours, with guns, not letting anyone leave or enter the store.

Once Tolbert was arrested and charged, Attorney Maryam Assar, who’s been working at our firm since she was in her second year at CWRU law firm and who at the time had only been a licensed attorney for about three months, convinced us that Tolbert was someone that our law firm should help. She provided us with information about Tolbert and New Era’s mission, including newspaper articles where Tolbert is lauded by City leaders. This includes City Council President Blaine Griffin, who was quoted in a 2023 Cleveland dot com article describing Tolbert as “a next-generation violence interrupter, a loose term describing civilians with street credibility who proactively engage with miscreants and mediate” disputes. “If I dispatch him and say, ‘Hey man, can you engage these folks?’ He’ll do that and redirect their energy,” Griffin said. “He understands the culture and language.” This article notes that “Griffin routinely contacts Tolbert when residents report nuisances: Perhaps a group of young people is cursing at store customers, or suspected drug peddlers have convened in a known crime hotspot; Tolbert’s patrol arrives on friendly terms, and the groups typically disperse.”

As soon as our firm formally appeared to defend Tolbert against these charges, we served discovery requests and third-party subpoenas for production of the footage from the gas station’s high tech surveillance system that would support the owners’ sensational accusations that Tolbert and his group “held the gas station hostage for three hours.” We knew the footage would not show any such thing. And lo and behold, when the prosecutors told us that they only had a short (30-minute long) clip of this footage — which showed customers and employees freely walking in and out of the store, while Tolbert and his group engaged them in conversation — the Court set a hearing for October 3, 2024 wherein we were informed, for the first time, that no additional gas station surveillance footage from any of the dates in question (August 3, 4, and 9) was available, and had apparently not been preserved.

At this point we moved to dismiss the charges due to the apparently intentional (and at best reckless) failure to preserve this highly exculpatory evidence, which the Court declined to grant. We had also made it clear to the prosecution by this point that Tolbert would not roll over on these charges, and that our law firm intended to mount a full defense on his behalf.

It’s important to note that at this time we did not have a grasp on just how bad this file was for the prosecution: that the body camera footage in the file showed, among other things a series of shocking admissions of bias by the investigating detective—Timothy Hannon of the Cleveland Police Department—who, within minutes of first arriving at one of the gas stations to respond to the owners’ continued efforts to have Tolbert charged referenced Tolbert’s successful lawsuit against the Cleveland PD for wrongful arrest in 2022, and said of the gas-station owners’ dubious accusations, “this is great, now we have something on him;” Hannon was also captured on camera during witness interviews stating that his “main goal” in his investigation is to ensure that Tolbert is no longer permitted to carry firearms, that Tolbert “shouldn’t be around children,” and dismissing the gas-station owners’ allegations relating to trespass and simple assault by saying “misdemeanors aren’t the battle we’re trying to have here”;

The file was also rife with facially absurd and self-contradictory accusations by the gas-station owners, most of which they completely flipped on at trial, including the accusation that Tolbert had threatened to “shoot” them and had demanded money from them in return for “security services” (Hannon is even captured on his own body camera last December telling the gas-station owners that his investigation was “lacking provability” as to any demand for payment by Tolbert).

There was also the body camera footage from officers who responded to the gas-station owners’ initial calls and either left the scene immediately because they were familiar with New Era and knew that they were the opposite of troublemakers; or specifically told the gas-station owners that the New Era members were doing nothing that fell outside of their well established First Amendment and Second Amendment rights;

And then there was the coup de grace: footage from a responding officer’s body camera (Detective Anne Reynolds, pictured testifying above) showing that one of the gas-station owners had walked out of view of the surveillance system to fire off a gunshot that they then sought to blame Tolbert and the New Era group for having fired, right as police were arriving at the scene due to the gas-station owners’ 911 call, thus (seemingly intentionally) putting the New Era members at risk of being shot by police. Detective Reynolds testified that she did not notice this footage when she conducted her investigation that day, and if she would have, she would have at least detained the gas-station owners’ guns and inspected them (the Cleveland PD did inspect the gun of at least one New Era member that day, but did not inspect any of the gas-station owners’ guns). This testimony was followed up by the gas-station owners’ admissions that they attended a meeting with Tolbert and former City Councilman Basheer Jones on August 14, 2024, only four days after Tolbert and his group had allegedly shot a gun at them (one of the gas-station owners remarked, off-handedly, that the wings they ordered “tasted real good”), and then invited Tolbert’s wife inside their offices twice to negotiate an end to the boycott.

Detective Hannon, however, was apparently aware of all of these flaws in his case, and instead of doing the right thing and simply dropping his pursuit of the bogus charges against Tolbert, he and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor decided to double down instead, including with a series of shocking and completely unprecedented legal maneuvers.

First, by February of 2025, nearly six months after he initially arrested Tolbert on the “extortion charges,” Hannon decided to pin additional felony charges not just on Tolbert but also on New Era President Austreeia Everson, Tolbert’s domestic partner and mother of his four-year-old son, as well as against Rameer Askew, then 19-years-old, an honor student at Cleveland State University, who had just graduated as president of his senior class at Cleveland’s Ginn Academy, and played defensive end for Glenville High’s state championship football team in 2023 (Tolbert, Everson, and Askew all have completely clean criminal records).

These two new sets of charges involving Everson and Askew were equally absurd:

First, as to the charges against Askew: As Detective Hannon was (apparently desperately) searching Tolbert’s phone dump for anything that could make charges stick to him, he noticed on New Era’s Instagram page a video that Tolbert had posted of he and Askew on July 27, 2024, breaking up an effort by a local marijuana dealer to sell $20 worth of weed to a 13-year-old child who was involved in New Era’s youth programs and whose mother had specifically requested New Era’s help in getting her son’s behavior under control. As shown on New Era’s own recording, as well as on police body cam, when the weed dealer arrived at the scene and saw Tolbert and Askew there to intercept him, he ran away leaving his car, along with the weed, a scale to measure it, and his phone; so after Tolbert and Askew then called 911 to report this incident, police arrived at the scene, impounded the car and other property, shook Tolbert’s and Askew’s hands, thanked them, and said “we appreciate what you guys do.”

It was more than six months after the fact that Hannon decided to retroactively charge this as not just criminal conduct by Tolbert and Askew, but felony one aggravated robbery and kidnapping charges, with the weed dealer as the alleged “victim.” The prosecution’s theory of criminal liability here is almost too absurd for words so we will just note the following here: (1) The prosecution apparently failed to account for the statutory definition of the word “deprive” that applied to the aggravated robbery statute, which requires that the defendant intended to permanently or substantially deprive the owner of rightful use of his property; (2) the police officers who responded to the scene that day admitted under oath (a) that they saw no reason to even think that Tolbert or Askew had committed any crimes that day; and (b) that neither Detective Hannon nor anyone had ever contacted them before deciding to pursue the charges against Tolbert and Askew relating to this incident; and (3) the weed dealer refused to participate in the prosecution’s attempt to frame him as a “victim” of Tolbert and Askew, such that he didn’t even respond to his trial subpoena, which caused the prosecution to obtain a warrant to have him arrested and spend the night in jail to be pulled out of his cell to testify the next afternoon. We had suggested to Judge Vodrey that this man should have an attorney to advise him of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination; Judge Vodrey appointed him a lawyer; and the prosecution’s would-be “victim” weed dealer pleaded the Fifth as to nearly every question the prosecutor asked him, and then admitted when I briefly cross-examined him that he “wanted no part of these proceedings.” As Mr. Richmond reported for Ideastream, the elected County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley was in the courtroom while this witness was testifying, “and spent much of it with his eyes closed and head tilted back, in apparent dismay over the testimony.” Just imagine how dismayed he would have been if he were in the defendants’ shoes. I argued to the jury that if anyone was guilty of “kidnapping” it was the prosecution for kidnapping this man to make him pretend he was the victim of non-existent crimes.

As to the later-appended charges against Everson, Hannon decided—again, about six months after the fact, and only after our firm had pushed the prosecution on the missing surveillance footage and made clear that Tolbert would not be pleading to any charges, with the trial set for early April of 2025— to charge her based on her attendance at a meeting at one of the Race Fuel gas stations, on August 15, 2024. This was the day after Tolbert was arrested, and Ms. Everson was admittedly invited to this meeting by the Race Fuel owners (as text messages confirmed), the same people who were allegedly victims of Tolbert’s “extortion,” and who claimed to have been shot at by Tolbert or another New Era member only six days before, on August 9.

This meeting was also attended by Cleveland State professor Shereen Naser, local attorney Mohammad Faraj, and Attorney Assar of our firm (who again had only been a practicing lawyer for about three months). Hannon and the Race Fuel owners apparently did not know that Everson was recording this meeting, which, as the recording showed, was nothing more than an attempt by well-intentioned community members to de-escalate the dispute between Tolbert’s group and the gas-station owners, to negotiate an end to the New Era boycott, and the gas-station owners’ agreement not to participate in the City and County’s pursuit of the bogus extortion charges against Tolbert. Throughout the trial, and in the months before, we felt as if we were through the looking glass, as Hannon, the gas-station owners, and the prosecutors attempted to frame these peaceful negotiations as felony “extortion,” “aggravated menacing,” and “witness intimidation.”

The testimony of Professor Naser and Attorney Faraj was devastating to the prosecution, as was Judge Vodrey’s instruction to the jury that there was nothing illegal or unlawful about attorneys meeting with witnesses to alleged criminal conduct, even when those witnesses are alleged victims. Absurdly, the prosecution and Detective Hannon tried to argue that Ms. Everson bringing attorneys and a professor to meeting—which, again, the “victim” gas-station owners invited her to—was actually more threatening than had she brought “uneducated” people to the meeting. The prosecutors argued with a straight face that it was a “flex” by Ms. Everson to bring two lawyers and a professor to this meeting, as if this somehow had any bearing on criminal liability; and they maintained that Ms. Everson’s statements that the boycott would continue if a resolution was not reached constituted “extortion” and “intimidation” as opposed to the obviously First Amendment-protected speech that it was.

Notably, the jury heard a recording of a phone call that Hannon placed to Professor Naser in January of 2025 wherein he not-so-subtly tries to intimidate her into cooperating with his attempt to charge Everson over her participation in this meeting, and repeatedly presses Naser as to whether Attorney Assar was present at this meeting. He repeatedly told Naser that whether Assar was at this meeting was an “important piece” of his investigation, which seems nonsensical in isolation but in context clearly shows Hannon’s unlawful and retaliatory motives:

It was three months later that we would find out that Hannon and the prosecutors were using the bogus charges against Everson—as well as the new charges against Tolbert and Askew relating to the aborted weed deal—as a pretext for seeking to disqualify our firm from representing Tolbert, Everson, or Askew against any of the charges. The timeline here leaves no doubt about this: The indictment on the new charges was issued on March 11, 2025, and the arraignment was on March 27, where Attorney Assar appeared, for our law firm, on behalf of Everson and Askew. The very next day, on March 28, the prosecutor filed an 18-page motion—which had obviously been prepared in advance, and in anticipation of our firm representing Everson and Askew—seeking to disqualify our firm from the case, claiming, absurdly, that Ms. Assar was “implicated in felonious conduct,” and that due to “conflicts” among the three defendants, “Ms. Assar and her law firm” had to be disqualified from representing any of them.

The shameful gambit by the police and prosecutor’s office here was obvious: They wanted our firm off the case because they knew we would fight them like hell and would likely obtain an acquittal on the charges because there was simply no merit to them. They also knew that after we beat the criminal charges we would likely sue them for violating the defendants’ constitutional rights, and that for each charge they obtained a conviction on, the defendants would be barred from obtaining civil relief.

This was not only yet another attack on the sacred constitutional rights of our clients, including their First Amendment right to access the courts for civil relief, and their Sixth Amendment right to be represented by counsel of their choosing; it was also a deplorable smear against a young attorney, Ms. Assar, who had only been licensed to practice law for three months, was only fulfilling common duties of a lawyer by attending a meeting wherein the parties were attempting to de-escalate and mediate a dispute.

Thankfully Judge Vodrey rejected the prosecution’s calculated effort to remove our firm from the case, and denied their motion to disqualify our firm from representing Mr. Tolbert, Ms. Everson, and Mr. Askew. And the the very reason the prosecution wanted us off the case in the first place came to pass, as we did obtain a complete acquittal from the jury on all fifteen of these ridiculous and obviously retaliatory charges.

As for the trial itself, a few especially extraordinary developments are worth mentioning here:
First, the absurd motion filed by the prosecution the day before trial seeking an order prohibiting the defense from even mentioning the First Amendment and the Second Amendment. Nevermind that this case was about a boycott led by a group that exercises its Second Amendment right to openly carry firearms, and that most of the prosecution’s case amounted to “look at these scary black people with guns, making demands.” In this motion, the prosecution repeatedly argued that if the jury were permitted to hear about these constitutional provisions that it would lead to “jury nullification.” The fact that these prosecutors were so terrified of the Constitution and were worried about jury nullification before the trial even started of course speaks volumes about the merits of the charges they brought.

There was also the preposterous testimony of Rubin Swift, who tried to maintain on the witness stand that he was an “owner” of the gas stations, but when questioned, had to admit he did not own any percentage of any of the gas stations, and had no documentation of any ownership interest. He also testified that he received no payment from the gas stations for his work in the years 2023 and 2024, because he told the gas-station owners that he had “come into money” and didn’t need to be paid. When I pressed him on that, he said he received “close to a million dollars” in an insurance settlement after his house burned down. When I asked him how much the house was worth, he said $80,000, and that the rest of the payment was for items inside the house, rebuilding the house, and “relocation.” This was all to cover for Swift’s apparent role as a compromised police asset, who served the Cleveland Police Department’s interests in pinning charges on Tolbert by acting as an instigator in this dispute, including by posing as an “owner” of the gas stations on the inflammatory and lie-filled Fox 8 report. The gas-station owners flatly contradicted almost all of Swift’s key testimony, denying that he had any ownership interest in the gas stations, and denying that Swift ever declined payment for any services he provided. “Why would he work if he didn’t get paid?,” one of the gas-station owners asked, rhetorically.

While Judge Vodrey limited us in our ability to probe Swift’s status as a police informant, he did allow us to serve a subpoena on the Cleveland Police Dept. that resulted in the production of approximately 45 police reports over the last 10 years, about 35 of which had Swift listed as a “victim” of alleged criminal conduct, with the rest identifying him as a “witness.”

The rest of the prosecution’s case—which took them three weeks to put on, after three full days of jury selection wherein the prosecution exercised peremptory strikes against every one of the surprisingly few black men who appeared in the jury pool (30% of Cuyahoga County’s population is black), except for the one who worked as a spokesman for the Cleveland Police Department, who was excused for cause over the prosecutors’ objection—consisted of the following: (1) Mostly extremely tedious, cumulative, and irrelevant testimony from about a dozen police officers, none of whom directly witnessed any of the alleged criminal conduct; the exceptions here being the officers who admitted that they arrived on the scene on the various dates at issue and did not see any reason to suspect or report criminal conduct by the defendants; that the defendants’ seemed to be acting well within their rights under the First and Second Amendments; and that the officers on the scene at the Race Fuel on August 9 suspected that the gas-station owners were the ones who fired the gunshot in order to frame the New Era group (if not have them shot or killed by police); (2) There were also the witnesses who emphatically rejected the prosecution’s notion that the defendants had committed any crimes, including Professor Naser, who gave a master class on the problems that exist in these neighborhoods and the beneficial role that Tolbert and New Era play in ameliorating these problems; and also the aforementioned 13-year-old, whom the prosecution tried to paint as a collateral “victim” on the absurd “aggravated robbery” and “kidnapping” charge relating to the intercepted $20 weed deal, but who sang the defendants’ praises and also – without prompting –clearly identified one of the gas-station owners as the one who fired the gunshot at the Race Fuel on August 9 (the prosecution apparently either didn’t notice or had forgotten that this boy was present at that scene, and didn’t bother to ask him any questions about it when they had him on the stand); (3) And then there was the self-serving crocodile tears of the gas-station owners, who—when they weren’t admitting that they exaggerated or outright lied in their interviews with police about this case, contradicting one another, or obscuring matters relating to who really owns and controls the approximately two-dozen gas-stations and 27 LLCs that they were presented as the “owners” of (with the oldest of them being 42 years of age)—mostly tried to convince the jury that Tolbert’s and Everson’s statements of intent to boycott the gas stations and demonstrate outside of them were actually serious threats of physical harm.

After the primary gas-station owner, Ibrahim Shehadeh, concluded his testimony, it was clear that the prosecution was losing the jury. After Detective Hannon tried to defend Melvillian pursuit of charges against the defendants, it was even clearer. And after Tolbert was on the stand for roughly two full days, wherein he conveyed his authentic commitment to the very community service and safety concerns that the prosecution was asking the jury to criminalize, we were especially confident that there would be no conviction in this case. At one point late in his testimony Tolbert stated of the August 13 meeting with Basheer Jones and the gas-station owners, “That was one of the few things Ibrahim [lead gas-station owner] didn’t lie about, those chicken wings were good,” and the jury erupted with laughter. Tolbert’s testimony was then buttressed by that of his co-defendants Ms. Everson and Mr. Askew, as well as other participants in the events at issue, and respected community leaders like Bob Render, who works closely with city leaders as a member of Cleveland’s Community Relations Board, and Tim Tramble, the President of the Saint Luke’s Foundation. In explaining why the charges against Tolbert did not cause him to revoke his support for the $150,000 grant that the organization had awarded to New Era, Tramble referred to the substantial feedback St. Luke’s had received from community members in support of New Era’s work, and quipped that “MLK was prosecuted too.”

All of which explains why, by the end of the five-week-long trial the prosecutors were so desparate to keep the jury from hearing the case that they sued Judge Vodrey in the Supreme Court of Ohio for a writ of prohibition to prevent him from presiding over the case, and for a writ of mandamus to prevent him from instructing the jury as to certain applicable and accurate statements of law that the defense had requested, and which Judge Vodrey had indicated he would grant. In these filings and their related public statements, the prosecution made some especially stunning accusations and admissions: including their complaints that the trial had turned into a “circus,” that the jurors were laughing at the notion that one of the defendants had committed extortion, and the prosecution’s especially rich statement that “the prosecution has attempted to ensure integrity in these proceedings but has been thwarted every turn by the antics of defense counsel and the ineffectiveness of Judge Vodrey.”

As I said in Court, and in response to a request for comment by Cleveland dot com: We did agree with the prosecution that the trial had become something of a “circus,” but that was only because the prosecution itself made a mockery of justice by continuing to pursue the obviously retaliatory charges against these prominent activists and community servants over conduct that is obviously protected by the Constitution. The more the prosecutors and their lead detective tried to pretend that Tolbert and his colleagues committed the crimes they stood accused of, the more ridiculous they looked. The prosecutors were also desperate to avoid having a jury instructed as to the legal doctrines that substantially insulate police from legal liability when they pursue obviously unconstitutional or otherwise baseless charges against innocent defendants (as the average juror, without such an instruction, would tend to assume that police and would not engage in such misconduct at least out of fear of being sued for it), as well as an instruction relating to the perverse incentives that the doctrine announced by SCOTUS in 1994 in the Heck v. Humphrey case creates for police and prosecutors by barring civil-rights plaintiffs from pursuing civil relief for wrongful prosecution where there is any conviction at all on the charge at issue, even a lesser plea for a minor misdemeanor. It was a classic case of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” and also an especially compelling demonstration of why the doctrines of qualified immunity from civil liability for police, absolute immunity for prosecutors, and the Heck doctrine should all be abolished or at very least substantially revised.

In the end, the jurors told us after the verdict was delivered that they didn’t really pay any attention to the jury instruction about police immunity. They were mostly focused on the lack of credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses, especially Swift and Hannon, and the prosecution’s simple failure to prove the elements of the charges they brought. Multiple jurors expressed their consternation at the fact that the prosecution kept focusing on matters that were irrelevant to the charges at issue; such as whether the New Era members had trespassed on the gas-station properties, or whether they had endangered the safety of the child who was the subject of the aborted drug deal. Several jurors approached the defendants outside of the courthouse to hug them, console them, and encourage them to continue in their work in the community. One juror – an older white woman — even said she wanted to join New Era.

Apart from being thankful for these jurors and their service, we can also be thankful that qualified immunity will not protect Detective Hannon or the City of Cleveland from liability here given the egregious and obviously intentional violation of our clients’ civil rights throughout these proceedings, including as to the destruction and manipulation of exculpatory evidence and Hannon’s admitted intent to bar Tolbert from owning guns by pinning felonies on him. That lawsuit will be filed soon and we’ve already sued the gas-station owners, Rubin Swift, and Fox 8 for defamation regarding the August 8, 2024 report, with malicious prosecution claims to be added to that suit as well.

We hope that others will join us in seeking to hold the City and County leaders responsible for these extremely farcical and unconstitutional proceedings accountable to the fullest extent permitted by our legal and political systems. The extreme commitment these so-called “leaders” displayed to pinning charges on our clients at any cost has no place under any decent system of law, and none of these people are fit to hold public office in this nation or State. Anyone paying attention to these proceedings would have to be concerned with the appearance that elements of our ruling class are committed to preserving their power at all costs, including by preserving their access to a permanent underclass that lives in the grip of poverty, violence, and crime. It is as if Tolbert and his New Era colleagues were targeted precisely for their effectiveness in even partially interrupting the cycles that have afflicted Cleveland’s most dangerous and poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and that anyone who dares take bold action to uplift the people in these neighborhoods will themselves become the target of state power.

We also hope that the story of these proceedings will further appreciation for the great American tradition of the jury trial as the last bastion of democracy when our public officials violate citizens’ rights and fail to enforce the laws as written.

Finally, anyone who wishes to share or obtain more information about this case and related matters should feel free to contact us.

Thanks to all for reading this post and for your attention to this case.