How We Reported the Kent Court Case Backlog Story

Over the past three months, Kent Patch has been reporting on the hundreds of unfinished cases left by a former judge in the .

Kent Patch started to investigate the situation after learning some cases that started in the Kent court were languishing without judicial action.

The reporting started with multiple in-person and phone conversations with the current Kent judge, Kevin Poland. Our conversations with Poland were followed by interviews with Portage County court personnel, local law enforcement and the public information director for the Ohio Supreme Court.

The former judge responsible for the backlog of cases, John Plough, did not respond to an interview request from Kent Patch.

The investigation culminated with the analysis of more than 400 pre-trial diversion cases awaiting action by and .

The reporting consisted of hours of reviewing conversations and entering case numbers into Portage County's online court records database to determine their status.

The gist of the story boils down to poor record keeping by Plough and his staff during his time on the Kent bench. One interesting fact to note is that Poland did not retain any of Plough's administrative staff when he took over the Kent court in January 2010.

Rather than publish one long story split into different sections, we opted to publish several shorter stories for ease of reader access. You'll find links to those stories below.

Scroll down for the other elements of this story:

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• How we Reported the Kent Court Case Backlog Story