*Lord have mercy! It was dramatic just watching it on video after it happened. We can only imagine what it was like to see it go down in real-time.
We’re referring to what happened at the Hamilton County Courthouse; Tracie Hunter, a former juvenile court judge, had to be dragged out of the courtroom by her shoulders this morning after she was sentenced to six months in jail. She also will serve one year of probation after she leaves the Hamilton County Justice Center. We’ll explain why shortly.
The bottom line is that Hunter was convicted in 2014 of having “an unlawful interest in a public contract.”
So how did this, err, interesting scene come to be in the first place? Basically, after Judge Patrick Dinkelacker executed the sentence and said, “Take her away,” the crowd in the courtroom went off and started shouting and at least one person appeared to charge forward from the spectator’s area and was arrested. And as you can see in the video, a sheriff’s deputy ended up removing the accused Hunter from the courtroom, by dragging her across the courtroom’s carpet toward its rear.
Watch the video below. The crowd’s explosive reaction happens around the 48-second mark.
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OK, so what the heck is all the drama about? Here’s a breakdown via the Cincinnati Business Journal:
Hunter was taken into custody nearly 4 ½ years after Dinkelacker’s predecessor, Judge Norbert Nadel, imposed the sentence. Nadel is now the Hamilton County recorder. Monday’s hearing came months after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Hunter’s request for a stay.
“All of the state courts have looked at this. You can shake your head if you like,” Dinkelacker said to Hunter before executing the sentence. “They said she received a fair trial. They all did their duty.”
For several minutes, Dinkelacker read several postcards sent to his home asking him not to send her to jail, many anonymous, which mentioned that the people writing them were registered voters.
Several brought up the fact that Dinkelacker was the first of two drivers who struck and killed a pedestrian standing in the middle of Central Parkway in 2014. No charges were filed against the judge, and the woman killed had cocaine in her system, according to police.
“This came to my house,” he said. “I don’t think some of them were very Christian. If the attempt was to intimidate me … it has flat out failed.”
Dinkelacker asked if Hunter wanted to address the court. She initially declined but then came to the podium as the judge went over the various court rulings on her case. The judge declined to let Hunter speak at that point, saying she already had a chance to do so and had declined.
Earlier, Dinkelacker read a letter from Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deterssuggesting her mental health be evaluated.
“She has not once showed remorse,” Deters wrote, according to the judge. “I believe she has some kind of mental condition.”
Deters’ office did not prosecute the case. The special prosecutor, Scott Croswell, said he agreed with the letter. But Hunter’s defense attorney, David Singleton, opposed the idea, saying Hunter had no mental health issues and had ably assisted her attorneys as they pursued her case.
“I can’t believe Joe Deters would ask for her to be evaluated,” Singleton said.
Singleton said Hunter has not been remorseful because she did not commit a crime.
“The conviction is unjust. Six months in the jail in a felony (Class 4) for someone who has never been in trouble before and someone who … still has a positive impact in our community is not just.”
Dinklelacker said he was doing his duty in executing the sentence.
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The story behind the former judge’s conviction is that she was accused of using her authority as a judge to get the medical records of an inmate that her brother, Steven Hunter, a former corrections officer, was fired for punching.
The news outlet reported that the Hamilton County Court of Appeals upheld Hunter’s conviction in January 2016. In a 4-3 vote, the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear Hunter’s appeal later that year.
The jury in Hunter’s 2014 case could not decide on two counts of forgery, two counts of tampering with evidence, two counts of theft in office, one count of misusing a credit card and an additional count of having unlawful interest in a public contract. Hunter was not retried on those counts.
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