Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley may be a Democrat, but he's not cut from the same mold as, say, Los Angeles County D.A. George Gascon or Philly D.A. Larry Krasner. O'Malley actually faced a challenge from his left during this year's Democratic primary, with law professor and former public defender Mathew Ahn criticizing the prosecutor for, among other things, supposedly overly harsh treatment for juvenile defendants. 

O'Malley, for his part, says the goal of the juvenile justice system is rehabilitation, but that doesn't mean that he wants to see every youthful offender released to the custody of their parents or simply placed on probation for their crimes. In fact, he's calling out a Cuyahoga County judge for going soft on a 17-year-old arrested and charged with a 2023 carjacking... which in turn led to a more recent crime that left one person dead and two others injured. 

In March 2023, a 17-year-old boy carjacked a 32-year-old man at gunpoint on West 100 Street and Loretta Avenue. In February of this year, he was found guilty of aggravated robbery with a gun. 

The same kid had already committed other crimes including leading police on a chase in a stolen car with a gun twice.

A juvenile court judge sentenced the teen to one-year probation for the carjacking. He wasn’t put on house arrest or given an ankle monitor.

“Within three months of being put on probation for a carjacking, he’s in another stolen car with a gun, speeding 85 I believe in the 25, and hits an innocent victim, severely injures them, but also kills an individual who is riding in the car with him,” O’Malley explained.

The tragic crash happened in May of this year. 

The prosecutor says the teen ran a red light at East 79th and Kinsman crashing into a car driven by a 55-year-old woman. The 17 and 18-year-old girls riding with him were thrown out of the car. After he crashed, the teen boy ran away. The 18-year-old died. The 55-year-old woman and 17-year-old girl had fractured spines and other serious injuries.

This teen had been caught with a gun on three separate occasions and was accused of committing a violent felony, but the judge essentially gave the defendant a pass by placing him on a single year of probation. O'Malley says "99.9% of the public would think that if you’re doing an armed carjacking with a history of previous violent crime that you should probably receive a punishment" that includes time in juvenile detention, and I suspect his figure is pretty accurate. 

According to O'Malley, the teen was arrested on a charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in February, 2022 but was released to his parents. In September of that same year, Judge Alison Floyd sentenced the teen to six months in juvenile custody for the first police chase where he was found with a stolen gun, but immediately suspended the sentence and released the teen. 

Just a few months later, in January of 2023 the teen was once again caught trying to flee police in a stolen car while armed, and was once again released to the custody of his parents. Apparently at some point that year he was briefly in custody, because in August 2023 he was charged with committing a riot in a jail facility; a crime for which he has yet to be sentenced. 

It appears, though, that the short time the teen spent behind bars last year was the exception and not the rule, even as his crimes have grown more serious since 2022. A single year of probation for carjacking someone at gunpoint is simply outrageous, and O'Malley is right to call out the judge for her failure to administer justice in this case.

The good news in Cleveland is that homicides are plummeting this year; down 32% compared to this time in 2023. The bad news is that a new generation of criminals is learning that crime does pay... or at least it comes with few consequences so long as they're underage. That's a terrible message to send to violent juvenile offenders, and hopefully O'Malley's attempt to name and shame judges for their soft-on-crime sentences will have an impact.