Stark County jury delivers Not Guilty verdict in 45-minutes on five-count, two-felony indictment based on flawed Canton Police investigation

Yesterday a Stark County jury came back in about 45 minutes with a Not Guilty verdict on all five counts, including two felonies, in a case that started with an eight-count, five-felony indictment wherein our client’s baby’s mother was very obviously lying about him to gain leverage in a dispute over custody of their baby. It was obvious to us, and obvious to the jury, but somehow not obvious to the Canton Police Department or the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office, the supposed professionals who are empowered and entrusted to decide how to allocate limited taxpayer resources in a way that effectively enforces and upholds the law.

The evidence against our client—a 23 year-old black man with stable full-time employment and no criminal history at all (not even a traffic ticket)—was so thin, and the police investigation so sloppy and obviously incomplete, that one of the prosecutors, on rebuttal after we delivered the closing argument for the defense, got back up in front of the jury and admitted that the Canton Police did a bad job on this case, but then said that the bad police work shouldn’t be held against the alleged victim. Nevermind our client, who was supposed to be presumed innocent but had to live for the better part of a year with baseless felony charges hanging over his head which have kept him from seeing his baby, now 17-months old, for the last ten months. The jury was so revolted by the government’s case and their witnesses’ preposterous testimony that they even acquitted our client of a misdemeanor criminal-damaging charge despite his admission that he’d broken a TV set that he’d bought for the alleged victim out of frustration with her own violent and vexing conduct toward him.

After the trial several of the jurors went and hugged our client and his mother and told them how sorry they were that they had to endure such an ordeal. The judge, who has been on the bench for about 11 years, said she had never seen that happen before.

The Canton Police Department and Stark County Prosecutor Kyle Stone owe our client an apology and more. Unfortunately, the judge-made doctrines of qualified immunity for police and absolute immunity for prosecutors make it extremely difficult for victims of police and prosecutorial abuses to obtain justice and accountability for their injuries. Thankfully there’s a group called The Ohio Coalition to End Qualified Immunity that’s close to securing a statewide ballot initiative whereby Ohio voters will get to decide whether to abolish this harmful doctrine that’s helped turn our “free country” into more of a police state than it’s been in generations. More on that later. For now we’ll just express our gratitude that our client got a fair trial in the Stark County Courthouse (as much as the case never should have been indicted in the first place), and, as always, for the U.S. Constitution, its guarantee of the great American tradition of the jury trial, and its requirement that before the government can brand anyone a felon in this country it still has to get a jury of 12 peers to agree that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As regrettable as it is when police and prosecutors fail to fulfill their most basic duties, it’s truly a glorious sight when 12 citizens pulled off the street apply basic common sense to deliver swift justice to remedy these failures.