It's time someone started investigating the Ohio Parole Board. Inmates sentenced before 7-1-96 with indefinite sentences received "good time" under O.R.C. 2967.19. All inmates served 8 months and 13 days for each year of their sentence. However, once seen by the parole board, you are no longer eligible for "good time" -- you must serve day-for-day. When defendants plea-bargain with prosecutors, they agree to serve a stated number of years under those terms. Yet, they are tricked by the system: no one tells them they must serve day-for-day time after the parole board continues them. The right hand of the system, the prosecutor, makes a "false" plea bargain agreement to close the case; they then use their left hand, the parole board, to violate the terms of those agreements.
Judges have refused to acknowledge motions filed by inmates stating, "Their claims are against the parole board." Judges sentence defendants and never inform them of the potential change in the time they will serve once seen by the "untouchable, inexorable, God Almighty parole board." Now they have nothing to say except it's "out of their jurisdiction." Those prisoners flopped by the parole board are now serving the same sentences as SB 2 prisoners, day-for-day. Judges and attorneys, isn't this somehow against the law of ex-post-facto?
There is something seriously wrong with a system that allows this type of travesty of justice to continue. We can only hope this issue will finally get into the federal courts with the perceptive, justice-oriented "jail-house lawyers" we now have. Let the federal courts look into the illegal and disgraceful practices of the parole board. Hopefully, they will decide that those "flopped" inmates have been held in prison, unconstitutionally, for years. A ruling such as this will put an end to the "uncontrolled" practices of Ms. Ghee and the "lifetime guaranteed jobs" of her civil service employees.
How many hardworking taxpayers and "victims of downsizing unemployed individuals" would love to have a job such as this? What immoral and unconscionable acts would they perpetrate to protect their jobs? Certainly not the same as the ones who hold those jobs now?