Ohio prosecutors broke rules to win convictions and got away with it

Ernie Haynes never imagined that taking care of his three grandsons after his daughter's drug overdose death would turn him into a felon at the hands of a longtime Ohio prosecutor known to sidestep the rules intended to protect a defendant's rights in criminal trials.

A week after his daughter died in December 2017, the court granted temporary custody of the children to their biological father, a man Haynes said also struggled with drug addiction. When Haynes refused to give up his grandchildren, Wood County authorities arrested him and charged him with six counts of abduction. The action sparked a five-year legal battle to clear his name.

"We never got to grieve ... because immediately we were plunged into this hell," said Haynes' wife, Marcella Haynes.

Ernie Haynes, 59, didn't know it, but the assistant prosecutor who would try his case, Thomas Matuszak, had a track record of repeatedly violating legal standards to sway juries at trials and win convictions, according to court findings. He would do the same in Haynes' case.

And it wouldn't be the last.

Matuszak is one of about 100 prosecutors across Ohio who the courts found had violated standards meant to preserve a defendant's civil rights in criminal trials, an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations, NPR and member station WVXU in Cincinnati, and The Ohio Newsroom found. He is one of 13 who did so more than once. Together, these 13 prosecutors accounted for nearly one-third of the 104 cases in the state where courts found that prosecutors acted improperly.

CJI and its partners examined hundreds of state appellate decisions to identify claims of prosecutorial misconduct in Ohio, reviewed hundreds of pages of police records and personnel files, and interviewed dozens of criminal justice experts, legal scholars, judges and defense attorneys from around the United States, along with prosecuting attorneys, and defendants whose cases were affected by the wrongdoing.

Among the findings:

• Of the scores of criminal trials from 2018 to 2021 in which appeals courts found that prosecutors acted improperly, most were for failing to disclose evidence and making inappropriate comments in closing arguments — violations that could have affected the defendants' ability to get a fair trial. Nearly 80% of the errors were ruled not egregious enough to warrant a reversal, which experts say enables prosecutors to make repeated mistakes with near impunity.
• None of the prosecutors involved in repeated improper-conduct cases was sanctioned by the Ohio Supreme Court, the body ultimately charged with doling out attorney discipline.
• All of the prosecutors found to have repeatedly acted improperly have continued to practice as attorneys, with some moving into more powerful positions, including two who became judges tasked with ensuring fair trials.

The findings are a first-ever attempt to pull back the curtain of anonymity shielding Ohio prosecutors from public scrutiny when