With two weeks to go in the Democratic contest for Cuyahoga County prosecutor, newcomer Matthew Ahn and the two-term incumbent, Michael O’Malley, clashed over many of the same topics that have defined the race thus far during a debate at The City Club of Cleveland Tuesday.
In appearances and campaign mailings, O’Malley is stressing his experience. He’s nearing the end of his second term as the elected prosecutor. Before that, O’Malley served as the first assistant prosecutor under Bill Mason and as a supervisor under Mason’s successor, Tim McGinty. He's also been a Cleveland City Council member and the safety director in the Cleveland suburb of Parma.
“I think it's not unsurprising that virtually every elected official, every union, including the police unions, everybody has supported me because I do have the experience,” O’Malley said during the debate. “I've demonstrated true leadership, and I know how local government works.”
Ahn is a visiting professor at Cleveland State University’s law school and has been a lawyer for 10 years. He’s originally from the Cleveland suburb of North Royalton and pushed back against O’Malley’s claim that he’s too inexperienced to run the prosecutor’s office.
“Does he offer experience or only entrenchment in a system that has been biased for far too long?” Ahn said. “For those of us who look different and who think a little differently and who run for office based on our commitment to justice rather than an invitation from insiders, for those of us who dare to run for office on what we know rather than who we know, our experience is always attacked and dismissed.”
Ahn pointed to a violent crime rate that has gone up in recent years and O'Malley's office’s high rate of trying juveniles as adults compared to the rest of Ohio.
Ahn has run to O’Malley’s left throughout the campaign on several foundational themes of the criminal justice system, including the practice of charging juveniles as adults, the use of the death penalty and several high-profile wrongful convictions O’Malley retried after an appeals court threw out the initial convictions.
Ahn has moved those issues to the center of the race in other debates and at campaign stops across the county, and his campaign garnered enough support to block an endorsement of O’Malley from the county Democratic Party.
In response, O’Malley has sought to portray Ahn as too radical for the office of prosecutor.
“He has advocated, believe it or not, in a community that has seen far too much violence, to abolish the police,” O’Malley said, citing Ahn’s social media activity. “This is not the rantings of a 16-year-old. This is from a 29-year-old man who knows better and knows what would happen in this community if we did not have police.”
Ahn did not respond to this allegation from O’Malley during the debate. His campaign manager, Ellen Kubit, later denied it, adding that Ahn went on the record as opposing police abolition during a public interview for a position on the Cleveland Community Police Commission.
“The reality of the matter is they are very much looking to distract from discussions about policy because he knows that he has failed as our county prosecutor,” said Kubit. “It’s abhorrent that his opponent keeps leveling these attacks.”
O’Malley cited his role in creating the county diversion center, which was opened to treat people with mental health or substance abuse issues who otherwise would go to jail, and his creation of an early intervention center to review juvenile cases and seek services for young people who end up in the system.
“I believe in the seven years of my tenure as Cuyahoga County prosecutor, I've done more to change this criminal justice system than any prosecutor before me,” O’Malley said.
After a question about whether the prosecutor should seek to bring more cases to trial instead of seeking plea deals, Ahn focused on the use of overcharging, an issue that has not received much attention during the campaign.
Critics say overcharging is the practice of charging a defendant with as many crimes as possible to force the person into a plea deal.
The prosecutor will often charge a defendant with more crimes than they are sure they can prove in court so they have leverage when negotiating a plea deal, said Ahn.
A defendant with a long list of charges faces decades in prison if they go to trial but can get many of those charges dropped if they plead guilty to a smaller number of charges before trial.
“These are the kinds of things that lead our community to not have faith in our criminal justice system,” Ahn said. “I have already committed to ending the practice of overcharging so that, if there is a plea deal to be made, it can be made with both parties negotiating in good faith. And if a case needs to go to trial, then it should go to trial.”
O’Malley questioned whether overcharging even exists, outside of capital offenses where a defendant can plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.
“Overcharging is really a buzzword that is hard to touch and hard to understand and harder to see,” O’Malley said. “I would be interested if he had one case where he could demonstrate that case was somehow overcharged.”
O’Malley also said often it is the grand jury, not prosecutors, who determine what charges a defendant faces. In those cases, jurors consider charges before a defendant faces a trial and could decline to indict on any charges where there was no evidence.
The Democratic primary for Cuyahoga County prosecutor is on March 19, the winner goes on to the general election where they will face a write-in candidate, Anthony Alto, running as a Republican.
