Dead Man Prosecuting
Dead Man Prosecuting
What in the hell is going on in the office of Franklin County Prosecutor Gary Tyack?
The Franklin County Prosecutor, due to their jurisdiction over the Ohio Statehouse, is the most powerful county prosecutorial office in the state.
Republican Ron O’Brien, a man obsessed but thankfully terrible at using the state’s monopoly on violence to murder black men, served six terms over the course of 24 years, the longest streak in county history.
It was a streak that worked well for the corrupt Statehouse Republicans (redundant, I know) and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #9 as they became one of the most powerful law enforcement unions in the country under longtime president Dewey Stokes.
But that was all set to change in 2020. Since a majority of American voters only care about which party controls the White House, there had never been a better year for the local Democratic party to topple O’Brien in a heavily-trending blue county with the odious Cheetoh at the top of the ticket.
The Rooster wondered why there wasn’t a line around party headquarters of local lawyers willing to run against O’Brien—not even city attorney Zach Klein, who lost to O’Brien, 49% to 45%, in 2016.
What has since been learned is Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther, as he’s wont to do, put his thumb on the scale of the race by personally intervening for longtime Columbus attorney Gary Tyack.
Tyack comes from a long lineage of lawyers in Columbus, so he made sense. On one hand, he’s not O’Brien, which was his main selling point. On the other hand, he can be depended upon to not rock the boat or challenge Ginther for the throne.
For their part, legislative Republicans saw the storm coming, which is why, months after Franklin County elected a Democratic prosecutor, they looked to change the rules relating to public corruption.
From Jeremy Pelzer of cleveland.com in June 2021:
COLUMBUS, Ohio—Republican-backed legislation to allow Ohio politicians accused of corruption to be tried in their home counties rather than Columbus cleared an Ohio House committee on Tuesday.
By a 9-5 party-line vote, the House Civil Justice Committee advanced House Bill 286, which would remove the Franklin County prosecutor’s exclusive authority to try Ohio public corruption cases. The Republican measure comes just months after a Democrat was elected to the position for the first time in nearly 60 years.
Just normal state legislators behaving normally! That the bill never became law shows you that the stroke Tyack suffered before the election might as well have killed him. He has effectively been dead before he took office.
Tyack could have cleaned the office of any link to his odious predecessor. Instead he chose to keep Republican operatives on his staff and was promptly rewarded for his bipartisanship when one of his most senior assistants almost killed his wife.
From John Futty of dispatch.com in July 2021:
Brian Simms has resigned as a Franklin County assistant prosecutor, one week after Westerville police arrested him on misdemeanor charges of domestic violence and assault.
Simms, 59, submitted his letter of resignation on Friday, Janet Grubb, first assistant prosecutor, who oversees the office's criminal division, told The Dispatch.
On June 26, Simms was accused by Westerville police of assaulting his wife at their home there "after an argument earlier in the evening," according to court documents.
"His wife had visible injuries to her neck and face area where Brian grabbed her by the throat and hit her in the face," an investigating officer wrote in an affidavit filed with the complaint.
Maybe this was just an unlucky event where a 59 year-old man decided to put hands on a woman for the first time in his life. Or, more likely, he was an obdurate piece of trash who should have been swept out of office at the first opportunity. In retrospect, the tell was him working under O’Brien for all those years.
Things haven’t gotten better since. In the last 10 days, Tyack’s office went 0-2 in major cases where they actually had to do their job.
The first involved a murderous cop who also stands accused of keeping an apartment complex of women from whom he extracted rent in the form of sexual favors. The audio of the cop murdering a woman from The Bottoms was caught on audio:
Unfortunately, the jury was unable to come to a unanimous verdict.
Will prosecutors reflect on their roles in participating in a culture where a Columbus police officer was able to avoid conviction despite them murdering a woman being caught on tape? No, absolutely not.
Will that prevent the odious Fraternal Lodge of Police Local #9 from blaming prosecutors for their failures to solve a majority of crimes in this city despite their bloated $308 million budget? Also no.
But cops aren’t the only men in uniform escaping justice. Consider the case of Dr. Husel, the Mt. Carmel doctor who executed 14 patients with lethal amounts of fentanyl.
He refused to accept a plea and now he’s a free man.
From Eric Levenson, Jean Casarez and Lauren del Valle of cnn.com:
The Ohio doctor accused of overprescribing fentanyl to his critically ill patients and hastening their deaths was found not guilty of 14 counts of murder on Wednesday.
William Husel and his attorney embraced at the defense table after the 14th and final not guilty verdict was read in court. He was subsequently discharged from the courtroom.
Fourteen counts! And they couldn’t convince a jury he was guilty of one of them.
The lesson to be learned is if you’re ever charged with a major crime in Columbus, make the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office prove it in court. Because, like all other prosecutors in America, they are only good at leveraging the brutality of this country’s prison system into plea deals so they can hit the golf course by 5 p.m. that day.
None of this bodes well for the one area where Tyack has done well—charging former Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy Jason Meade with murder for shooting Casey Goodson Jr, a black man, five times in the back as he walked into his grandmother’s house with a Subway sandwich as Meade was in the neighborhood serving an arrest warrant for another individual that went apprehended on the day.
The Rooster is privileged to know many fine attorneys in Columbus. We do not deny this is born out of self-interest of needing a battery of attorneys when the state inevitably tries to haul us to jail.
However, these attorneys, which work in numerous arenas of the law, are unanimous in their opinion that Tyack’s office, which is serious in nature, is filled with unserious people.
“Whenever I call their office,” one criminal defense attorney told The Rooster, “It’s a clusterfuck. Even if it’s the most routine matter.”
Such are the perils of electing a dead man as prosecutor.
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