The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office misled one judge and circumvented another, prompting the jurists to call out prosecutors, with one saying they skirted the “rule …
The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office misled one judge and circumvented another, prompting the jurists to call out prosecutors, with one saying they skirted the “rule of law” to keep a freed man behind bars, according to court documents.
The office’s treatment of a Black man strikes at the heart of the racial injustice issues fueling widespread protesting after George Floyd’s death in police custody, the man and his lawyer say.
Christopher Smith,38, criticized his “unconstitutional conviction,” as a federal judge termed it, and the machinations of state officials to keep him locked up and potentially exposed to the coronavirus even after he’d won an immediate release.
The prosecutor’s office denied the allegations against it in an email to The Enquirer.
Smith said he felt dehumanized by the justice system and its actors and lamented all the time Black people have lost to mass incarceration.
“They’ve been killing us without actually shooting us,” Smith said last week from Berry International Friendship Park in the East End.
A federal court granted Smith’s release due to DNA evidence withheld at his trial that he and his lawyer, Michele Berry Godsey, said proves his innocence in a 2007 armed robbery case that involved a stolen $800. Another man’s DNA was discovered on evidence, but details favorable to Smith weren’t shared with him by the state for his trial, according to court records.
Smith was initially sentenced to more than two decades in prison until a federal judge overturned the conviction in April.
Smith’s wrongful confinement may have ended there, but a prosecutor misled a judge to secure an order to keep Smith in custody, according to Judge Robert Ruehlman, one of the longest-serving judges on Hamilton County’s Common Pleas Court.
“It’s the rule of law. You have to follow the law,” Ruehlman said in recorded comments to the federal court, to explain why the federal judge’s order to release Smith hadn’t been heeded. “…being a judge it upsets me that (the release) ruling was not followed.”
After Smith was ordered released, a local prosecutor called Ruehlman to try to stop it, the judge said.
“They said he (Smith) was going to be released … and they wanted an order stopping that or having him arrested at some point,” Ruehlman said. The prosecutor’s office denied Ruehlman’s characterization in its email to The Enquirer.
“… I shouldn’t even have gotten a phone call,” Ruehlman continued. “If the prosecutor read the order properly, correctly, they would have seen that it was an unconditional release. An unconditional release. There’s no arguing with a federal judge.”
Ruehlman said that after he declined the prosecutor’s request for an order to detain Smith, the person sought out a different Common Pleas Court judge, Jody Luebbers, and told her that Ruehlman had approved her signing an order to further detain Smith, Ruehlman said, even though he had never granted such approval.
“I never gave the prosecutor permission to do that or (gave) them permission to tell another judge to order (Smith) being held against” the federal judge’s order to release him, Ruehlman said. The state can’t even seek bond for Smith because his status under the federal order is to be “unconditionally released.
