DREAM DENIED

By Tracie M. Hunter, Suspended Judge

As we prepare to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, I received a postcard
from my lawyers informing me of another execution of sentence date, if the federal court
rules against my Petition of Habeas Corpus review for my wrongful conviction.

As the first African-American Juvenile Court Judge of Hamilton County, Ohio, and the
first African-American Democrat elected to the Common Pleas Court, Juvenile Division,
by the people, not by appointment, I am still waiting to serve a six-month jail sentence
five years later, not for crime, because no crime was committed; but because I dared to
defy a system run by white Republican males and internally controlled by their families
and friends. For the first time in the county’s history, a person of color was at the helm of
one of the largest courts, exercising control over one of the larger county budgets,
determining millions of dollars in service contracts and making personnel decisions, like
Magistrate hires. This impacted political families who relied on the court’s patron jobs.

It all began when I ran for judge to instill equality and justice in a broken system. Certain
that I won the election, which was called for my opponent, I sued the Hamilton County
Board of Elections to force them to count valid votes that had been discarded. After a
very hostile 18- month federal court battle, during which I was bullied to drop my
lawsuit, I won my case. I was sworn in as Judge in May 2012, nearly two years after my
term began. My election case changed federal laws that today help all citizens and future
candidates, not just me. My lawyers received one million dollars. I received zero. I was
even denied over $254,000 in back pay I was entitled, because the Ohio Supreme Court
and Hamilton County officials decided that as a black woman I should just be happy
getting the judicial seat they withheld from me. My lawyers said they would fight to get
my back pay, but I am still waiting. After I was wrongfully convicted and suspended, I
was deprived of over $400,000 more in salary, in violation of Ohio’s Constitution.

Finally, I was sworn in May 2012. I started work after they put my opponent John
Williams, who lost the election to me, in office as judge before, me. He began to take
over the system internally in their efforts to keep me from hiring more black people and
implementing laws equitably for all people. I hired two black Magistrates anyway. I also
historically hired a black bailiff, black law clerk and judicial assistant.

I began to thoroughly review cases brought before me, many which had been sitting in
Juvenile Court under prior judges for up to 10 years. They lied and claimed I was not
ruling timely. The Casey Foundation released a report shortly after I was sworn in
showing that Juvenile Court cases had been backlogged for decades and were keeping
children from being adopted. The media ran with a lie, without checking facts, to cover
for prior judges. It was all in black and white that Juvenile Court had a case management
problem that long preceded me. When the media falsely attributed the backlog to me, I
sent them all the study with documentation and over 40 exhibits that they refused to
report. Supreme Court reports showed that Judge Williams, who reported to the Supreme
Court that my cases were out of time, had the most cases out of time at Juvenile Court.

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In my thorough reviews of cases, I uncovered that Juvenile Court was submitting
inaccurate data of case statistics to the Supreme Court. I emailed Connie Murdock,
director of Case Management to inquire why the reports didn’t balance out. First, she
denied it; but when I persisted, she admitted that the reports were wrong and that they
had been incorrectly preparing the mandatory reports. I then contacted the OSC because I
refused to sign mandatory reports, compiled by the clerk’s office, with inaccurate
statistics. They instructed me to sign them with notations that they were incorrect.

The Supreme Court then sent a team of people to Juvenile Court to begin cleaning up the
inaccurate reporting problem I uncovered. It was so bad and extensive that they were still
fixing the problem when I was conveniently charged with crimes to get me out of the
court. They attempted to suppress the fact that I discovered the inaccurate reporting
system, but there is a lengthy email trail between myself and the Supreme Court, proving
otherwise. The entire juvenile court reporting system was overhauled as a result of my
findings. It seems the court had been reporting inaccurate statistical data for years.

Whenever I ruled against the prosecutors, there was obvious backlash. I was informed
that some prosecutors hated me. I was also told by a police officer in District 3 to watch
my back because police officers were told during roll call to watch me in my courtroom
and report anything I did as Judge that they didn’t like. Although prosecutors refused to
follow my court orders to turn over police reports in multiple cases and the Court of
Appeals overturned my rulings on appeal, those cases made it to the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and upheld my rulings in those cases.
Ironically, the same week I was convicted, my rulings established new law in Ohio.

When I declined to accept pleas from children that were poorly represented; overturned
cases where laws and procedures were not properly followed; requested competency
reports on children that were clearly incompetent, or reversed cases where the kids
weren’t provided legal counsel, I was accused of being an advocate for children and not a
judge. In one instance, after I dismissed a case that had been improperly filed, the mother
of the child overheard the public defender lawyer tell the prosecutor outside my
courtroom that he tried to help the prosecutor out by requesting I not dismiss the charge.
In another case, this same lawyer convinced a child to plea to a number of felonies after
meeting the kid only five minutes in the hallway. I refused to accept the plea and ordered
a mental competency evaluation. The child was later deemed incompetent. They were
angry when I followed the laws that they should have been following, but were not.
Juvenile Judges have great latitude and ethical responsibility to protect children’s rights. I
implemented changes to fix the injustice, but they didn’t want it to be fixed.

Additionally, when I prohibited the media from publishing the names and faces of
children, to protect the children’s safety and ensure their successful rehabilitation,
WCPO, a Scripps Howard Station, and the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Gannet Publication,
sued me. Most media outlets across the nation do not publish children’s names and faces,
as a matter of policy, even in the most serious of offenses. The local court rule I applied
clearly instructed me to protect the children’s identity; and the child psychologist I

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retained to evaluate the children determined it would harm the children and prevent their
rehabilitation. Nevertheless, I was reprimanded by the Court of Appeals and held in
contempt for following the court rules as written. I was never allowed to argue my case
or defend the fact that I followed pre-existing laws. I was the only judge in Hamilton
County prohibited from controlling the media’s conduct in my courtroom. In those
lawsuits, prosecutor Joe Deters office poorly represented me, over my objection.

When I requested independent counsel as judge, to represent my court, which the law
requires when there is a conflict of interest between the statutory lawyer, which was
Deters, who was openly hostile towards me in numerous media accounts, and more
importantly, still suing me in the election case, I was denied legal representation by
Deters’ mother-in-law, Judge Sylvia Hendon and the Hamilton County Board of
Commissioners. In most every other instance where a Hamilton County Judge was sued,
including John Williams, Patrick Dinkelacker and Megan Shanahan, those judges were
represented by a respected law firm out of Columbus, Maguire and Schneider.

In nearly 30 unprecedented lawsuits brought against me as judge to harass and intimidate

me, I was forcibly represented by Deters, whose prosecutors failed to file answers to the
lawsuits, resulting in 12 default judgments against my court. After I filed a complaint
against Deters with the Ohio Supreme Court for throwing those cases, he attacked me
publicly and withdrew from my case, but handpicked lawyers James Bogan and Firooz
Namei to represent me. Neither had any Juvenile law experience or ever represented a
sitting judge, but were financial donors and friends of Deters. Immediately after I
reported Deters for ethics violations, he retaliated, accusing me of crimes in office.

After I filed Notices of Appeals with the Supreme Court in those lawsuits that resulted in
default judgments, in order to protect the Juvenile Court, Deters accused me of felony
theft in office for responding to the lawsuits his office bungled. The prosecutors knew I
had not stolen anything as a judge and Hamilton County Commissioners admitted that the
lawsuits were the official business of the county, which was in fact responsible for all of
the fees payable to the Ohio Supreme Court. I was obligated to handle court business.

Case managers altered my judicial entries, but prosecutors alleged that I forged my own
entries and charged me with crime. The state’s software expert admitted that they knew
before I was charged that case manager Lisa Miller and her supervisor Connie Murdock
changed my entries. Miller testified that she routinely did it the way she had been trained
by Murdock. I was new to the Court and had no knowledge of how the system operated.
In an email, where I questioned a particular entry, Murdock wrote that Miller cut and
pasted my entries after I signed them. Yet I was falsely charged with tampering with
evidence and forgery, crimes that they admitted they committed, and not me.

The truth is that the worst thing I could do as a black woman was to upset their well-
controlled system of manipulating the electoral process in Hamilton County and
disrupting their financial applecart that relied on the Juvenile Court system for its bread
and butter. When the jury was stacked with neighbors of Republican judges, and a
forewoman whose husband was an attorney for the law firm that represented WCPO, the

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TV station that sued me, it was apparent the fix was in. There was even an employee of
WCPO on my jury. It is nearly impossible for that many people with direct ties to the
case and prosecutor’s office to occur in a randomly selected jury pool. Moreover, Judge
Norbert Nadel refused to poll the jury, as the law requires; then failed to grant a mistrial
after three jurors reported that their verdicts were not guilty, immediately following trial.

After all, they had spent countless millions of dollars to destroy my career and reputation
as a black woman for having the audacity to do what they had prevented from happening
for over 100 years, making it to the top of the Juvenile Court. They depended on those
patron jobs within the court to employ their families for over a century and to train
prosecutors that they handpicked to run both the juvenile and adult courts systems. My
presence as judge and ability to hire new staff disrupted their historic ability to control
the human resources and the money, including the millions of dollars in service contracts
that I was required to sign off as judge. They opposed the change I represented, and for
the first time, not having one hundred percent control over the system, including the
children and families, predominantly African-American ones, who comprised the system.

I was falsely accused of crimes, charged, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to jail
because I had the audacity to stand up and fight back in a system that has been
systematically and strategically destroying black and poor families and children in
Hamilton County for over a century, while being hailed as a model court across the state.
When I was elected to Juvenile Court, we had the highest bind over rate of children in the
Juvenile Court system in the state of Ohio, despite being only the third largest county. I
pointed that out during my campaign for office and tackled it head on when I was elected.
They didn’t like my exposing the Juvenile Court’s dirty laundry. I passed an order
prohibiting the shackling of juveniles in my courtroom. They opposed and openly
criticized me when I passed that order in 2013. In 2016, the Ohio Supreme Court
followed suit and prohibited shackling of Juveniles across the state of Ohio.

One reporter that interviewed me asked me if I was a maverick. I never set out to be one;
I just set out to implement the laws of the land as judge and to ensure equity of treatment
for all children and adults that appeared before me of every race, gender and hue. I know
now, that was my real crime, defying the status quo and interrupting the school to prison
pipeline. I was supposed to be grateful just to be a judge and to do whatever the
prosecutors wanted me to do in their cases. I was expected to humbly bow my head in
submission to the white elite and to ignore the injustices I saw in the Juvenile Court daily.

Today, over nine years after I crashed the glass ceiling and became the first African-
American and first Democratic Judge of the Juvenile Court, and five years after the date I
was falsely charged with crimes, the discussion is not about the multiple federal and state
laws I changed or the legal precedents I set as the first black judge. Instead, I have been
strategically criminalized by officials, who vigorously opposed my election; and
systematically denied my constitutional rights. I was treated differently than every other
judge that preceded me in Juvenile Court, all who were white. They were allowed to run
their courtrooms without intervention in whatever manner they saw fit. I was
criminalized for implementing justice, upholding people’s constitutional rights to be

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treated with dignity and respect or properly represented and for whistleblowing when I
exposed internal corruption and attempted to instill justice in a broken system.

On this Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I no longer march with hope or sing with
conviction that things will change in Cincinnati because, for me, nine years after I fought
for equality and justice for all, I still await jail for pursuing the dream that Dr. King died
for. Justice has not rolled down for me like water or righteousness like a mighty stream.

Instead, I have been treated like a black stain on the white fabric of a system that
continues to feed the school to prison pipeline and to turn children into profit. Now, I too
am a part of the system I fought so hard to change. However, this unimaginable
experience has not weakened my faith in God, but only made me stronger in my
commitment and determination to keep Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream alive for all.