CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Attorney Steve Dettelbach argued Monday that the Ohio attorney general’s investigation of Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish should end with no criminal charges because it lacks the critical elements of a criminal case.
One is that crimes must include criminal intent, Dettelbach said in a meeting with reporters and editors at cleveland.com. He said people do not commit crimes by accident, and Budish had no criminal intent in any of the matters under investigation, including eight deaths in the county jail.
Another is that no allegation exists that Budish personally profited from the areas being investigated, Dettelbach said.
Lastly, when courts are used to hold people accountable for the kinds of things being investigated, such as the jail deaths, the cases involve civil litigation, not criminal prosecution.
Even in the worst light, Budish's actions simply do not rise to the level of crimes, said Dettelbach, the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
“There’s no ‘there’ there in this investigation,” Dettelbach said.
Dettelbach’s statement came days after state and federal authorities raided Budish’s office as part an investigation that began last year with a focus on the county’s IT and human resources departments. The focus of that investigation shifted in recent months to focus on the county’s beleaguered jail. The U.S. Marshals service concluded that inmates at the jail did not have adequate access to health care in the facility thanks, in part, to a shortage of nurses.
Eight inmates died in a six-month span in 2018, including four suicides, three drug overdose deaths and one inmate who died of cancer.
Dettelbach said that any policy or budget decisions made by Budish that might have contributed to problems in the jail are not a criminal matter. There might be “legitimate criticisms” of Budish’s actions in office, but making poor budget decisions, adding more people to an already crowded jail, being too conscious of jail costs, and not having enough nurses on staff does not equate to a crime, Dettelbach said.
Complaints about those types of decisions should be aired in civil court or another venue instead of prosecutors pursuing them through criminal charges, Dettelbach said. He cited his decades of working in law enforcement, most recently as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio and noted that he is not familiar with any other cases being filed against administrators for policy decisions in the wake of inmate deaths.
Dettelbach and Budish leveled a series of other complaints about how the investigation has unfolded. Chief among them is the appointment as special prosecutor of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who was asked to take over by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley.
Yost’s office has thus far declined to comment about the raid or it’s investigation into Budish and his office.
O’Malley’s team led the investigation for about a year, but O’Malley recused himself on Feb. 1 because he has to defend Budish and the county in a federal civil lawsuit filed by inmates over conditions in the jail.
Dettelbach said he was the one who raised the question of the county prosecutor’s office’s potential conflict of interest in the case. He said that Yost was the one prosecutor in the state who might have an even larger conflict of interest in the case than O’Malley. Dettelbach ran and lost to Yost in the November race for attorney general. Budish has called the raid a “political attack.”
Prosecutors from O’Malley’s office who steered the investigation for much of last year have remained on the case. They are now appointed as special assistant attorneys general, and report directly to Yost. Dettelbach said he asked Yost to remove those prosecutors from the investigation, but Yost declined.
He called the team investigating Budish “very aggressive.”
Thus far, the investigation has led to three indictments, and seventeen subpoenas have been served on the county. Former jail director Ken Mills is accused of lying to County Council about his role in blocking the hiring of nurses at the jail, and lying to investigators. The county’s current human resources director, Douglas Dykes, is accused of tampering with records related to bonuses that were improperly awarded to a former IT official. And former IT General Counsel Emily McNeeley is accused of steering contracts to a company where her spouse worked.
Dettelbach and Budish declined to say if Budish was subpoenaed to testify to the grand jury. Budish also declined to say what he knew about the health care crisis in the jail, and when he was first made aware of the problems.
“The information I was getting was things were OK in the jail,” Budish said, continuing to defer to state jail inspectors who found no significant issues with the jail outside crowded pods and minor problems.
Budish reiterated that he has been forthcoming with investigators throughout the process and said his administration has turned over everything they have requested thus far. He said he has not falsified or destroyed any documents related to the investigation and he is not aware of any other people or county employees doing so.