Plough Left Legacy of Unfinished Cases

Hundreds of unfinished cases are what remain of John Plough's embattled term as a Portage County Municipal Court judge in Kent.

Plough, who was elected to the bench in 2005, left in 2009 with his only term marred by complaints filed against him by attorneys and judges and tainted by reprimands from the Ohio Supreme Court.

His exit was followed in July 2010 with the one-year suspension of his law license by the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled that Plough jeopardized the judicial process by, among other charges, failing to keep adequate records.

The current Kent judge, Portage County Municipal Court Judge Kevin Poland, took office in 2010 to find close to 700 unresolved cases on his desk awaiting action.

Poland declined to comment on Plough's record-keeping practices or on the state Plough left the Kent court's records in when he left the bench at the end of 2009.

"It's my responsibility now," Poland said.

Plough, a Ravenna resident, did not respond to an interview request from Kent Patch.

The Portage County Clerk of Courts office conducted an inventory of Plough's cases when he left office and discovered the huge backlog.

Lori Evans, adminstrative assistant for Portage County Clerk of Courts Linda Fankhauser, is the clerk who found and cataloged all of Plough's cases that needed further action.

Evans said Plough was not following the typical procedure for disposing of cases — particularly the pre-trial diversion cases, in which the defendant agreed at their first court appearance to plead guilty for the promise of eventual dismissal of their charges provided they completed several court-ordered tasks.

"I don’t know if I would say he was wrong," she said. "What he was allowing was to allow the person to fill out their expungement paperwork at arraignment."

Once a defendant pleaded, Plough's staff was supposed to send a record, or a journal, of all proceedings and paperwork filed to the clerk's office to keep track of the case. Many of those journals were never sent, Evans said.

"The previous judge was not good with paperwork, and all that pretty much never got addressed," Evans said.

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