YOUNGSTOWN — Lynn Maro and Gina DeGenova are in a tough battle to decide which one will get the first full term as Mahoning County prosecutor after the retirement two years ago of longtime county Prosecutor Paul Gains.

DeGenova, a Democrat, who has held the position the past 21 months after being selected by the Mahoning County Democratic Central Committee in January 2023 to complete Gains’ last two years, touts her achievements since being elevated by Gains to chief assistant prosecutor.

The Mahoning County commissioners appointed DeGenova interim county prosecutor Nov. 22, 2022, after Gains announced his retirement effective Dec. 1, 2022. Two other people submitted letters to the commissioners seeking the appointment, former county assistant Mahoning County prosecutor Brad Gessner and Maro.

The Mahoning County Democratic Party Central Committee then selected DeGenova Jan. 7, 2023, to fill the remainder of Gains’ term, which still had two years left on it.

In her role as public information officer starting in 2021, DeGenova has reached out to the community to make the prosecutor’s office more visible, to educate the public on how to stay safe and provided annual reports and other information about the office.

DeGenova said she has “nearly quadrupled the programming we have.” She has spoken to 55 groups on scams and frauds, juvenile law and bullying. And she started a special victims unit to better prosecute crimes against vulnerable victims.

As primarily a civil attorney at the prosecutor’s office during much of her 17 years working for Gains, DeGenova served as legal counsel for numerous lawsuits and served as the attorney for sheriffs Randall Wellington and Jerry Greene. Since becoming prosecutor, she has expanded her role in criminal cases and took a central role in high profile murder cases, including the sentencing hearings for killers Brandon Crump Jr., who got 52 years to life in prison in the murder of 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney; and Steve W. Green III, who got life without parole for killing Ashley Lockhart, the mother of his child, in Austintown in 2021.

Maro, a Republican, has been a lawyer for 33 years, 23 of that as a private-practice criminal defense attorney. She has handled eight death-penalty cases in her career and 50 murder cases at the trial court and appellate court level. She has handled high-profile murder cases and over 500 felony cases, she said. She was one of the attorneys for murder defendant Kimonie Bryant, co-defendant of Brandon Crump Jr.

Maro is a critic of Gains and the way he ran the prosecutor’s office for 26 years and continues to discuss the shortcomings of the prosecutor’s office since DeGenova took over.

“For about 23 years … I’ve complained about the same dysfunctional things over and over again — rules and laws not being followed, cases being … dismissed or not guilty, or delayed because rules were not being followed,” Maro said during a candidate interview.

She gave out statistics she generated that she thinks show how things could be better if she were the head prosecutor of Mahoning County instead of DeGenova.

“Fifteen percent of our murder cases in the past four years have been dismissed or not guilty,” Maro said, adding that the number is zero in Trumbull County. Trumbull officials confirmed that during the last two years at least, the rate is zero. Maro said the statistic came from looking up murder cases through June 30 in the common pleas court database.

DeGenova provided statistics for the last two years since she’s been prosecutor, and the rate is 14.3%, though she disagrees with the methodology of that percentage, saying two cases charged and convicted as involuntary manslaughter should be added to the equation, reducing the percentage to 12.5%.

DeGenova also noted that the percentage is much lower if the 19 pending aggravated murder and murder cases are added to the equation.

The two aggravated murder or murder cases that were dismissed or not guilty during her time as prosecutor are the murder and other charges dismissed against Calvin Shelton in April and the acquittal by a jury of D’Aundre Turner in June. The other 12 cases resulted in convictions.

DeGenova said the Shelton murder dismissal took place because after Shelton’s co-defendant, Timothy Underwood, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the case, the assistant prosecutor, Nick Brevetta, did not feel there was sufficient evidence to go forward with Shelton’s case. DeGenova noted that Brevetta “is no longer working with us.” Underwood was sentenced to 12 to 16 1/2 years in prison.

Turner was found not guilty at the end of a trial in the 2016 shooting death of Omar R. Croom, 22, on Youngstown’s East Side. A co-defendant, Ranee Fitzgerald, testified in the trial that she was married to Turner and had a child with him and that she set up a meeting with the victim at Turner’s direction and saw Turner shoot Croom.

Fitzgerald pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and obstructing official business in August and was sentenced to five years of probation for her role in the case.

MORE STATS

Maro also has cited other statistics related to murder cases being reduced to manslaughter, saying the percentage is too high.

“Seventy percent of our murder cases are reduced to manslaughter in Mahoning County. That’s outrageous,” Maro said.

She said she thinks Trumbull County has better numbers and says the reason is that prosecutors there work more closely with law enforcement “to make sure the evidence is in place before charges are filed.”

The difference between a murder conviction and manslaughter is that a murder conviction results in a life sentence, meaning the defendant is sentenced to a life sentence with parole eligibility after a certain number of years. A manslaughter conviction generally results in a defendant getting a specific number of years in prison.

DeGenova said Maro’s 70% remark is inaccurate and “discounts the fact that convictions for manslaughter are still exactly that, convictions. They represent closure for victims’ families and prison sentences. These defendants did not simply walk out the door back into society. Some defendants also pleaded guilty to other crimes and specifications, which resulted in longer prison sentences.”

DeGenova said trials are “uncertain, and there is no guarantee that any prosecutor’s office is going to get a conviction on a given case. By negotiating a plea agreement, we can provide a victim’s family certainty that the perpetrator will be convicted and punished for his or her role in the killing.”

She said amendments from murder to manslaughter “happen all over Ohio and are not unique to Mahoning County.”

DeGenova provided statistics showing that of 16 homicide cases that have been resolved since she became prosecutor in 2023, half (8 of 16) were reduced from murder to involuntary manslaughter.

“What Ms. Maro is saying is we should never resolve cases (through a plea), and we should go to trial on every case. Justice would stop at its nose. There are a lot of factors that go into it. Are there resolutions in some cases? Of course. But these are convictions with large sentences.”

Kimonie Bryant, one of the three men indicted in the Rowan Sweeney murder, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and was sentenced in July to 20 years to life in prison. Maro was one of his attorneys.

DeGenova said Maro asked for prosecutors to reduce Bryant’s charges to manslaughter, but prosecutors refused.

DeGenova said the prosecution needed Bryant to testify against the “actual shooter (Crump). Kimonie set it up. He brought Brandon Crump with him. Brandon Crump went in there and assassinated this four year old at close range.” She said identifying the shooter was “difficult” “because No. 1 everyone in there was shot.” DeGenova was referring to Rowan and the four adults in the home in Struthers where Rowan was killed.

DeGenova said Bryant was going to testify as to who the shooter was. “We reached a resolution with (Bryant) because he wasn’t the shooter. We wanted to get the shooter.”

DeGenova said the plea to involuntary manslaughter in the Shamara Green case happened because the family of London Jones, 13, who Green killed , wanted that type of plea. Green was sentenced to seven to nine years in prison for shooting the stray bullet that killed London.

“The family of the victim did not want to go through a trial. It was a mistake. They asked us to do that,” DeGenova said, adding that under Ohio’s Marsy’s Law, “We are required to meet and collaborate with family members to make sure they are OK with those sentences.” She said in a plea, the defendant takes responsibility for what they did, and it “gives the family closure. It doesn’t drag on.”

COMMUNICATION

Maro stated in a Vindicator questionnaire that as prosecutor she will implement procedures to better communicate with law enforcement officers to prevent wasting their time.

“When law enforcement is not advised of the status of a case or if a case has been resolved, waste is the result,” she stated. “Officers often appear for hearings that have been (postponed) or canceled because the case has been resolved through a plea. This results in a waste of financial resources.”

DeGenova said that since she became prosecutor, she instituted regular meetings with the Youngstown Police Department. “We meet with (Capt.) Jason Simon and my heads of criminal. We not only talk about pending cases, but pending investigations that have not made their way over to our office,” she said, adding, “On average our collaboration and communication with law enforcement is very good.”

Another communication-with-law-enforcement issue Maro mentioned is “last minute disclosures of evidence,” which Maro said also causes delays in bringing cases to trial, inconvenience to the judges and their staff, and inconvenience to witnesses and victims.

Maro said the prosecutor’s office could get the necessary information to prosecute cases better by bringing victims and witnesses into grand jury proceedings more often and questioning them about crimes instead of having a police officer summarize the testimony of the witnesses to the grand jurors.

“I would present actual witnesses to the grand jury, so that the grand jurors and the prosecutor can assess the strength or weakness of an account and judge the credibility of the witnesses’ account,” she stated.

DeGenova said the prosecutor’s office has a great relationship with police officers and does call victims and other witnesses to testify at the grand jury, but there are good reasons not to call victims to testify at the grand jury.

“There are times victims are 4 years old, 10, they are rape victims, survivors of domestic violence, so they give statements to the police, and the police come in (to testify at grand jury) because all we need to show at grand jury is probable cause. And that is all it is supposed to be.

“My opponent is approaching this as a defense attorney: ‘Let’s bring the victim’s in again. Let’s cause them to talk again about having been raped by their father and their uncle or beat by their husband,'” DeGenova said. “Some of our victims don’t have a car. Some have kids,” DeGenova said.

Maro was one of the defense attorneys in a case in which Judge John Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court chastised the county prosecutor’s office in June of 2023 for failing to turn over a document to the defense called a bill of particulars, which provides specific allegations against a defendant.

It was the murder case of Marquez Thomas and his sister C’Mone Thomas. The judge called the prosecution’s failure to turn over the document “inexcusable.”

At the time, DeGenova said that as a result of the problem “we are imposing a new policy where we check the files 30 days out (from trial), and we make sure these requests are compiled with.”

KNIGHT CASE

The better known evidence related controversy involved the two murder cases of defendant Lavontae Knight, in which defense attorney David Betras complained of late evidence, and Judge Durkin removed former assistant prosecutor Dawn Cantalamessa from the case in June of 2021 before DeGenova was prosecutor, saying Cantalamessa showed “careless indifference to ascertaining the truth” regarding evidence in one case and made a false statement to the court and “failed to periodically and regularly review her case file” to determine whether any evidence was missing.”

DeGenova said in her candidate interview that the evidence issue in the Knight case was one area where she disagreed with Gains. In early 2021, Gains had elevated DeGenova to chief assistant prosecutor and questioned staff on the matter.

“I said ‘Why is this happening?’ And they said ‘We don’t go back and look at the investigator’s file.’ And I said ‘Unacceptable.’ We improved and implemented procedures since the Lavontae Knight debacle where we have our investigators and our paralegals work with law enforcement on a regular basis to make sure what is in their file is in our file.”

“Criminal rule 16 requires that we provide it and therefore we are going to make darned sure that we have it,” DeGenova said.

DEGENOVA

DeGenova said her office had a 98.6% “conviction rate” on all criminal cases during her first year as prosecutor — 2023.

Maro’s campaign literature provides a different statistic – “percent of criminal cases dismissed,” and says the percentage in 2023 for the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office was 7%, compared to 1.6% for Trumbull County.

DeGenova said Maro has focused a lot of her criticism of DeGenova on the performance of the prosecutor’s office before DeGenova was in a leadership position at the prosecutor’s office starting in January 2021 and before DeGenova took over as prosecutor Jan. 6, 2023.

“Paul was a great leader, gave me my chance, but I see things a little differently than he does. I’m not going to criticize Paul. I just would do it differently. I have to look forward and look at how I am going to do it differently. I can’t control what happened in the past.”