Butler County Common Pleas Judge Keith Spaeth took a look at the 2012 court caseload numbers from the Ohio Supreme Court, which were released exclusively to the Middletown Journal/Hamilton JournalNews, and said the decrease in criminal cases didn’t surprise him.
“I think the criminal cases are down slightly because there has been a reduction in funding of police operations, due to budget crises,” he said.
Hamilton Police Chief Scott Scrimizzi said arrest totals in the city this year are down by 118 (there were 2,600 arrests during the first five months of 2012). The Hamilton Police Department had 128 police on the beat in 2007, an all-time high. Now, they are down to 104, Scrimizzi said.
“I would say this is directly correlated with the amount of manpower and nothing more,” he said of the case load numbers. “It is undoubtedly due to less people on the street.”
Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell believes there is more aggressive police work involved in the uptick in criminal cases in his county. But he and Judge James Flannery also blamed heroin. They said the cases they are seeing are not necessarily drug cases per se, but heroin is involved.
“It can be any different type of a case that’s out there, but in many of the cases, usually, heroin is a component,” he said. “It may not be a heroin case, but it’s a property crime case where so-and-so did a burglary so they can get heroin… When anecdotally you dig under the surface as to the reasons why defendants are committing these offenses, a large part of it is driven by heroin addictions.”
Spaeth, who runs the felony drug court in Butler County, agreed heroin has “taken over.” And because it is relatively cheap and highly addictive, often drug-dependant defendants do not apply for his treatment court, Spaeth said.
“So many drug addicts would rather do their time, pay their penalty and get back out on the streets and start using again,” he said.
The caseload numbers also show foreclosures have fallen into the range they were prior to the recession. There were 2,580 foreclosures filed in Butler County in 2006 and 2,489 last year. Foreclosures for non-payment reached their peak in Butler County at 3,166 in 2010.
Warren County’s foreclosure cases have dropped 25 percent since they peaked in 2010 with 1,450 new filings. Flannery said he has noticed the falling foreclosures, and even though banks are still foreclosing, they are not always selling the homes. He said federal regulators are pushing the banks to clear their books so bankers are negotiating with their debtors.
“They are going to work out something… As soon as they get a judgement that says they’re entitled to a foreclosure, then they’ll sit down and talk seriously with the people and say, ‘Okay, what can you really pay?’ ” he said. “If you’ve got a job and you can make a payment, you’ve got a good shot at holding onto your house.”
Butler County Judge Craig Hedric said he isn’t presiding over as many jury trials these days and the case load numbers bear that reality out. Jury trials have fallen off by 64 percent in his county and 34 percent in Warren County.
Hedric said he isn’t sure what to attribute that to, other than the prosecutor’s office is taking a different approach to plea bargaining because of the strength of its cases.
Prosecutor Mike Gmoser called that a good theory, saying, “The long and short of it is I feel that a hard line on strong cases results in guilty pleas and acceptance of responsibility.”
Defense attorney David Washington said the legislature had as much to do with shrinking jury trials as anything. After House Bill 86 passed a couple years ago, penalties for lower level felonies were significantly reduced, he said.
“Some of the risk factors have been eliminated… Before there were cases that I knew on an F-5 (fifth-degree felony), with some judges that they would lock them up for a year,” Washington said. “In some of these instances now with the house bill, they have more opportunities to be placed on probation on the lower felonies. So we don’t risk it at trial like we used to.”
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