A Most Undeserved Honor

The placement of a $160,000 statue of the late County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan in Huntington Park , a public space downtown, honors a man of strong but often wrong principles.

As Barbara Tuchman has written, "Honor wears different coats to different eyes."

I do not think there is any question that Corrigan, who served some 35 years as prosecutor, was tough on criminals.

Yet, he sometimes saw crime where there was none; and looked the other way when there was misdeed.

I was talking about Corrigan with a former Plain Dealer reporter who once wrote a piece for my newsletter, Point of View, about one of Corrigan's bad decisions.

I said that Corrigan was racist. He surprisingly disagreed with me.

Then I quoted to him what he wrote back in 1970 in Point of View, "There was room for subtleties in the three-week trial of Rabbi David Hill and James Raplin (both black). John T. Corrigan, County Prosecutor, protector and self-styled champion of the white race, scored a predictable victory with another all-white jury conviction of Hill and Raplin in Canton." He also called Corrigan, "The White Crusader."

That sounds to me as though he were describing a racist, I told him.

The second paragraph told more: "William J. Coyne, Corrigan's top trial assistant, won not only a racist-soaked guilty verdict but also a consecutive sentence for Hill and Raplin from a politically-motivated judge who allowed the jury to make the decision he should have made by dismissing the ludicrous, unproven charges." (Point of View, Vol. 3, No. 11)

The case had to do with protests against and a boycott by blacks of McDonald's restaurants for the lack of black ownership. Extortion was the claimed crime.

Corrigan also was a staunch conservative Democrat and law-n-order type. He was feared for his power to indict.

The point is that we often forget too much of what has happened and how that may effect the present. Past events have a way of coursing through the system of a community long after they have been forgotten by most.

To those who would say that this is old stuff and doesn't matter now, I'd say that John T. Corrigan's biases still course through the actions of many present prosecutors and, even more important, sitting judges.

Corrigan may be dead but the attitudes he inspired continue to thrive in our community.

I also paid some attention to Corrigan in the past, particularly in some radio commentaries I did for WNCR.

In one I commented: "The prosecutor often holds justice in his hands and in Cuyahoga County I don't trust the hands.

"We have reason again to suspect that County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan uses his offices selectively to treat some criminals with velvet gloves and others – particularly the poor, black and those without political connections – with viciousness."

This particular piece had to do with his leniency with a business manager of the Cuyahoga County Board of Mental Retardation. He had political friends. Corrigan dropped 10 felony charges in exchange for a guilty plea on one other charge.

This was a pattern, I pointed out, reminding listeners of two other criminals, Philip Gaeta and Sonny Harris, freed with Corrigan's cooperation after 42 days of a jail sentence of one to ten year terms. The two were public officials.

Likewise, Danny Greene – who "volunteered," as I put it, "a bit late that he had killed Michael Frato in the small war among garbage haulers" – was "charged with manslaughter by the Grand Jury, always under Corrigan's thumb." Greene, who was later assassinated in a bombing, pled self-defense.

I said at the time of Greene's Frato killing, "One would have thought despite a series of violent acts, bombing and murder involving the garbage hauling business that the whole thing were some sort of minor misunderstanding."

I went on: "And you'll remember the accused murderer who testified for Corrigan against Harlell Jones and then had first degree murder charges conveniently dropped a few days later. And similar treatment was given a young man who testified against Ahmed Evans. Despite admitting setting six fires and having pending charges of first degree murder for knifing a 68-year old man 11 times, he too was freed."

Harlell Jones, a prominent 1960s black activist, spent years in jail before he was freed of the 1972 murder charges and the case against him subsequently dismissed. Harlell was refused a separate trial for murder but was linked with four others. Corrigan's office accused Jones of "ordering" but not participating in the murder by the four. Jones had long been a Corrigan target for organizing blacks in the 1960s. After the Hough riots, unable to prove anything against Jones, he was cited in a grand jury report as a "recurring figure." Actually, during the Glenville uprising, Mayor Carl Stokes called upon Jones for help in quelling violence.

Under Corrigan, Cuyahoga County was one of the most aggressive counties in Ohio in pursuing the death penalty, according to a report cited in the Plain Dealer.

The PD reported that Carmine Marino, one of Corrigan's chief prosecutors, was rebuked in several federal court decisions "for flouting the rules, hiding key evidence and even lying in court to win convictions" in murder cases.

Judge Daniel Gaul said of Marino's work, "It's nothing but one deceitful act after another… To permit anyone to be put to death after being prosecuted by Carmen Marino would be so ethically inappropriate you'd almost be culpable yourself."

The PD in excellent reports by Bob Paynter and Mike Tobin noted:

"From 1981, when capital punishment was reinstated in Ohio, until 1991, when John T. Corrigan retired as prosecutor, Cuyahoga County was among the state's most aggressive pursuers of the death penalty. Moreover, prosecutors were far more likely to get it during Corrigan's tenure than any time since then.

"Roughly 70 percent of all the death sentences that have been issued from Cuyahoga County since 1981 were already on the books or in the works by the time Corrigan retired in 1991. (He died in 2003.)"

Prosecutors who break the law to convict are worse than criminals themselves.

It appeared that under an all-powerful Corrigan it was practice to "get" people even if the proof was unavailable or wrong. Judges feared Corrigan's power and he tried to influence justice at election time by opposing judges and pushing judges he felt were acceptable to his kind of justice.

Stokes wrote about Corrigan in "Promises of Power," "He had come out of Cleveland's West Side Irish ghetto, where racial hostilities and prejudice are part of the West Side Irish-Catholic heritage. Corrigan is personally honest, and it is hard to criticize honesty. However, I happened to think there are things you do and things you don't do that can reflect on your consistency. To my knowledge, Corrigan has never investigated the activities of the Democrats who have dominated the county commission's office for decades and handle budgets twice the size of Cleveland 's. As far as I know, he never investigated the activities of City hall until the Stokes administration, yet nothing happened during my two terms that did not happen long before I got there."

Unfortunately, the long-standing mind-set of the Corrigan years remains active in Cuyahoga County today.

This, among so many other issues, requires on-going and intensive examination.

With the new medium of the internet and the decline in reporting in newspapers, opportunity awaits new forms of alternative watchdogging of community institutions.

Some years ago, I tried to convince a few like-minded people of the need for a funded organization to examine, in particular, public and private corruption here. Not just the corruption of Nate Gray-type political payoffs, but the fraudulence of the unethical behavior that poisons our civic life.

An example would be the critical examination of such an important instrument as prosecutorial power – the supremacy of life and death over individuals.

I think the need for such civic scrutiny only becomes greater and greater.

The internet with its ability to help spread information could make such inspection of the public and civic realms easier.

With a little bit of funding, a whole variety of watchdogs can be set loose to act as independent (free in the First Amendment sense) "reporters" to examine and report on important issues, people and institutions. It could balance the neglect of newspapers worried about bottom lines more than our communities.

With newspapers failing to spend for investigative and probing coverage, it appears more important to cultivate new voices, both individual and institutional. Their task would be to scrutinize sharply those in positions of power.

Where are the funders for a new era of George Seldes and I. F. Stones? We need them more now than ever.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATroadrunner.com
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