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Cleveland

Your Guide to Cuyahoga County Judges

Award-winning judge guide updated for November election.

This is The Marshall Project - Cleveland’s newsletter, a twice monthly digest of criminal justice news from around Ohio gathered by our staff of local journalists. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters.

Before you vote, get to know the candidates with our updated judge guide

As early voting begins this week, The Marshall Project team published our judge guide for the Nov. 5 general election. The guide was created with Signal Cleveland to be shared for free with news and community partners across the area.

Often, voters skip judge races because they don’t know enough about the candidates or are confused by the “name game” that has historically played out in Cuyahoga County elections. The guide includes insights on the judicial candidates, who also get the chance to answer questions submitted by community members.

For this fall’s election, voters in Cuyahoga County will pick six Common Pleas court judges. Those judges handle felony criminal cases and civil disputes. In addition, seven other candidates are on the ballot, but face no opponents. Four are already on the bench and three — Carl J. Mazzone, Lauren C. Moore and John J. Spellacy — will be new to the court. Three Juvenile Court judges also are running without challengers.

We’ve also added profiles of the six candidates running for three seats on the Ohio Supreme Court. It’s an important race that could reshape the court after decades of Republican control.

Republicans currently have a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court. If Democrats win all three races, the court’s majority would flip for the first time since 1986.

The court’s seven justices consider cases that raise constitutional questions and appeals from lower courts about everything from abortion access, redistricting and the death penalty to the advertising of boneless chicken wings.

The deadline to register to vote was Oct. 7. In-person and absentee voting began Oct. 8.

Our judge guide to the primary election was recognized nationally last month with the Gather Award presented by the Online News Association.

Read our new judge guide.

Mayor, city respond to The Marshall Project - Cleveland, News 5 report on traffic stop disparities

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb brought top police and administration leaders together Oct. 2 to discuss how the city analyzed all police encounters in 2022 for the city’s first “Stop, Search & Arrest” report. The federal consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice required the city to produce and analyze a report.

The news conference came a day after The Marshall Project - Cleveland and News 5 published an analysis of nearly 17,000 police stops in 2023.

We found that officers stopped Black people twice as often, searched them three times as often and arrested them nearly four times as often as White people in 2023. This is despite White people having contraband at similar rates, according to the analysis.

We shared our data findings with the city prior to publication, and city analysts agreed with our findings. We spent months analyzing the data. We also spent weeks knocking on doors and made countless telephone calls to speak with drivers who were stopped by police in 2023.

Hours after the news conference, City Council President Blaine Griffin agreed that a deeper analysis is needed by the city to determine whether policing is free of bias.

“It is concerning whenever you look at the raw data,” Griffin told News 5. “And it’s reinforcing something that many of us have thought since the day we were born.”

Bibb, however, urged the public not to draw conclusions until outside experts have examined the stops.

“It would not only be unfair but also unethical for the city as well as the public to jump to conclusions without understanding the full scope and context around this topic and, more importantly, whether or not there are indeed any problems,” Bibb said.

More than a dozen Black people told The Marshall Project - Cleveland and News 5 that they believed police targeted them because of their race and used minor violations to look for larger crimes.

“It has something to do with the color of our skin,” said Vanika Burks, who was stopped four times in 2023. “I can’t see it any other way.”

– Mark Puente

Judge Celebrezze faces misconduct claims over appointing lucrative divorce cases to friend

Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze is facing multiple counts of misconduct alleging she steered lucrative divorce cases to a personal friend, according to the Ohio Disciplinary Counsel.

The three misconduct counts, filed Sept. 26 with the Ohio Supreme Court, come a year after The Marshall Project - Cleveland detailed how Celebrezze accepted several divorce cases and appointed Mark Dottore and his company as receiver.

Celebrezze has described Dottore as a lifelong family friend, but denied the relationship violated any ethical standards. Celebrezze and Dottore did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the complaint, Celebrezze is accused by the Ohio Disciplinary Counsel of making a false statement during the investigation and violating multiple rules of judicial and professional conduct relating to public confidence and avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

The Disciplinary Counsel alleges in the complaint that Celebrezze “disclosed to at least two of her fellow judges that she was in love with Dottore, and that she had consulted with attorneys about getting a divorce from her husband.”

The misconduct complaint stems from Celebrezze appointing Dottore and his firm to act as a receiver in complex, often lucrative, divorce cases. The Marshall Project - Cleveland reported in July 2023 that three of the court’s five judges did not appoint receivers.

For more details on the complaint against Celebrezze, read our story here.

– Mark Puente

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