The complaint was against Clark County Municipal Court Judges Valerie Wilt, Daniel Carey and Stephen Schumaker, who in September referred the case to the Clark County prosecutor for investigation.
The HBA asked the Ohio Supreme Court to “stop the preferential treatment of Trump and Vance” and have the case assigned to a different judge “who hasn’t been tainted by an improper process” and restarted from the beginning.
The Clark County case filed by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and Jozef requested charges of felony inducing panic, disrupting public services, making false alarms, two counts of complicity, two counts of telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing.
Those requests for charges reference comments made by Trump and Vance regarding false claims about Haitians in Springfield killing and eating residents’ pets. Shortly after those claims were amplified by Trump, Vance and thousands of others online, the community was hit by a wave of bomb and safety threats.
HBA’s complaint to the Ohio Supreme Court alleged the local municipal court violated its own rules and gave Trump and Vance special treatment when administrative judge Wilt had the clerk designate a special case number and when she wrote an entry saying that the case “presents an issue of importance and significant public interest.”
The complaint said that Wilt’s ruling to have the case reviewed and decided by all the judges was “totally unauthorized by any law.”
The municipal court, represented by Springfield’s law director Jill Allen, said in the motion to dismiss the supreme court case that the HBA did not follow proper procedure to appeal the municipal court’s rulings to the high court. The Ohio Supreme Court sided with the municipal court in its order dismissing the case.
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