Editor's Note (April 2024)

In 2022, Columbia Journalism Investigations set out to scrutinize the improper conduct committed by local prosecutors during criminal trials, using the only public record that shows how they can violate rules meant to preserve a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial: appellate court decisions. CJI fellows spent nearly two years reviewing and analyzing thousands of these decisions from 2017 to 2021 in order to build a database connecting misconduct claims and rulings to individual prosecutors in Ohio. This original dataset laid the foundation for our three-part investigative series published in December 2023, and produced in collaboration with NPR, WVXU/Cincinnati Public Radio, Ideastream Public Media and The Ohio Newsroom.

CJI fellows developed a methodology for compiling this database in consultation with legal scholars at Columbia Law School and elsewhere. After testing several methods for gathering court opinions involving claims of prosecutorial misconduct online, we decided to focus on Ohio. National data show that the state has a high number of exonerations based at least in part on findings of prosecutor mistakes, long-serving chief prosecutors and an aggressive use of the death penalty, all factors that experts say can contribute to improper conduct by prosecutors. We also were able to run keyword searches on the Ohio Supreme Court’s database of appellate decisions and download cases directly.

The team used more than a dozen keywords to gather Ohio appellate decisions that could contain some sort of claim about a prosecutor mistake over a five-year period. We identified an initial universe of roughly 1,600 appeals. The CJI team used the same methodology and applied various criteria to focus on those cases that we determined would be most relevant to our larger reporting question: what happens when criminal defendants file claims of prosecutorial misconduct in Ohio? 

Most of the 1,600 cases did not meet these standards, as defined by our methodology, but roughly 450 did. Because of time and resource constraints, we analyzed appeals adjudicated between 2018 and 2021 for all allegations of improper conduct; for claims alleging Brady-related violations, we analyzed the full five years, from 2017 to 2021.

CJI fellows used the dataset to examine how county prosecutors do their jobs, what happens once a claim of improper conduct is made, and what the case outcome signals about the state’s criminal justice system. We looked for patterns in the data to identify trends in case outcomes, outlier counties and trial prosecutors with more than one improper conduct finding, among other things.

CJI is making public the universe of Ohio appellate decisions. To the left is the list of cases, organized by case name and citation.

To read the full series or learn more about the project methodology, visit our webpage. You can also find the Improper Conduct stories on NPR’s site as well as The Ohio Newsroom’s site.