Staff file photo / Ed Runyan Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn Maro said recently that prosecutors from several counties have agreed to handle about 15 Mahoning County criminal cases instead of county prosecutors because of conflicts involving her and John Juhasz, chief of the criminal division of the prosecutor’s office, and their previous work as defense attorneys.

YOUNGSTOWN — There is likely to be a delay in the 7th District Court of Appeals ruling on whether to affirm the convictions and sentencing of Brandon Crump Jr. in the 2020 murder of 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney.

On Jan. 23, the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office filed a “notice of potential conflict” with the appeals court, asking to be allowed to withdraw as counsel for the state in the appeal.

The reason is that Lynn Maro, who was elected the new county prosecutor in the Nov. 5 election, and John Juhasz, who is now her chief of the criminal division of the prosecutor’s office, served as the attorneys for Kimonie Bryant, a co-defendant of Crump.

As Bryant’s attorneys, Maro and Juhasz reviewed the evidence with Bryant in his case and Bryant “provided information implicating Mr. Crump. In exchange for dismissal of the death penalty specification against Mr. Bryant, he agreed to provide information against Mr. Crump and cooperate with the State of Ohio,” the filing states.

Bryant further gave a “proffer” in the case, stating on the record in a conversation with prosecutors, statements “implicating Mr. Crump,” the filing states.

Because of their representation of Bryant, the filing states that it would be “ethically appropriate to give notice of a potential conflict and that the entire Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office withdraw as counsel.”

The filing noted, “As everyone in Mahoning County knows, the Rowan Sweeney case was an emotionally traumatic event that involved protracted litigation for all the defendants.”

The filing added that Maro and the rest of the prosecutor’s office do “not want something to happen in this case that causes the victim’s family and / or the citizens of Mahoning County to question how the appeal was defended by the State of Ohio.”

The filing states that if the appeals court allows the prosecutor’s office to withdraw from the appeal, “the Ohio attorney general and / or his designee have agreed to be special prosecutor and will enter an appearance and assume prosecution in this case.”

The filing discusses the obligations of an attorney to “be loyal” to a client when representing them as defense attorney and to “maintain the privileged confidences shared with her. Likewise, she is now loyal to the State of Ohio as the principal prosecuting attorney for the State of Ohio in Mahoning County.”

The filing added that the “legal system’s authority depends in large measure on the public’s willingness to respect the system’s decisions and to obey those decisions because the system is, and appears, above reproach.”

Attorney Rhys Cartwright-Jones, who represents Crump in the appeal, filed his merit brief last month laying out several errors Cartwright-Jones says Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Anthony D’Apolito committed in the case, including allowing “over 100 gruesome and repetitive photographs” of the crime scene, which Cartwright-Jones said unfairly prejudiced the jury against Crump.

It asked for the appeals panel to grant Crump, 22, a new trial.

Other errors alleged in the filing are that D’Apolito should have dismissed a “conspiracy” charge in Crump’s indictment for lack of an “overt act,” should not have allowed testimony suggesting that Crump committed “other acts” in Youngstown that connected to evidence in the Rowan murder and that there was insufficient evidence to convict Crump of Rowan’s killing because of “unreliable eyewitness testimony.”

Finally, the filing argued that the judge failed to adequately consider the mitigating factors presented during Crump’s sentencing hearing regarding Crump’s “severe childhood trauma” and “mental health diagnoses.”

Crump was convicted of the aggravated murder of Rowan and other offenses, and Judge D’Apolito sentenced Crump in July to 52 years to life in prison.

OTHER CASES

At a Jan. 29 meeting with Mahoning County commissioners regarding the prosecutor’s office budget, Maro told them prosecutors in several other counties have agreed to take over other cases for which Maro and / or Juhasz have a potential conflict of interest because of their former roles as defense attorneys.

Maro said those counties are Cuyahoga, Columbiana and Summit. She estimated at that time there were about 15 such cases “where we’ve had conflicts — either John and I represented the individuals on the cases that are still pending or previously. There is no cost to (Mahoning) County at all for those other agencies stepping in to help,” she said.

Maro said, “Everybody jumps in because everybody ends up having conflicts with family members, with relatives, with people they worked with. So they reach out to other counties.”

On Monday, two attorneys from the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, including former assistant Mahoning County Prosecutor Brad Gessner, were in the Mahoning County Courthouse for a hearing in the aggravated murder case of Akeem Hargrove, 31, after Maro filed a motion in that case asking for special prosecutors to handle the case because she represented Hargrove starting in January 2023.

Hargrove is charged with aggravated murder in the Dec. 22, 2022, killing of Devon Bell, 26, at the Shell gas station on South and Samuel avenues on the South Side.