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Home > Blogs > Ohio politics > Archives > 2009 > June > 05
Friday, June 5, 2009
Brunner supports gay rights legislation
Democrat Jennifer Brunner, who is running for her party’s nomination for the 2010 U.S. Senate race, is supporting a bill in the Ohio House that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Our state and our nation have long banned discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender and religion,” Brunner said in a press release. “These matters are not matters of choice, but of the diversity of the human condition. Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity are incompatible with our laws guaranteeing freedom from discriminatory treatment. We must become a more tolerant society, respecting one another and guaranteeing equal rights to the freedoms and prosperity of our society to all.”
House Bill 176 is expected to pass the Democrat-controlled House but it may stall in the GOP-controlled Senate. This is the fourth time in eight years that such legislation has been introduced in Ohio.
At the federal level, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act is expected to be introduced in Congress this year.
Brunner, who is secretary of state, is up against Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher for the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, the leading contender is former U.S. Rep. and White House budget director Rob Portman.
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Ex-con turned lawyer gets off probation
Derek Farmer, an attorney who served 18 years in prison as an accomplice to two Dayton murders, got his law license back a year ago on a probationary status. On Friday, June 5, the Ohio Supreme Court took him off probation.
In November 2006, the supreme court suspended Farmer for a year for misconduct and reinstated his license in April 2008. The complaints against Farmer stemmed from two imprisoned clients and their families, who paid Farmer for work in 2002. He later withdrew from representing them and his work for his fees was disputed.
Farmer was sent to prison for his role in the 1974 shooting deaths of Dayton police Sgt. William K. Mortimer and civil rights leader W.S. McIntosh in the wake of a jewelry store robbery in downtown Dayton. Farmer was 16 at the time.
McIntosh was outside the jewelry store as Farmer and his nephew, Calvin Jerome Farmer, then 18, ran from the shop and he told them to stop. Derek Farmer complied. His cousin shot McIntosh. That same morning, Derek Farmer surrendered seconds before his nephew fatally shot Mortimer, 43, as police closed in on a housing project in Dayton.
Calvin Farmer was convicted of murder, but served the then eight-year minimum before he was paroled in 1983.
While in prison Derek Farmer earned his high school and college diplomas before his release on Oct. 29, 1992. He passed the bar in 1999.
