MANSFIELD: Pouring Water on Drowning Men

By Mansfield Frazier

A common lament of Black elected males hereabouts is they’re becoming an endangered species… over the years their numbers diminishing as they’re replaced by Black female officeholders. The numbers differential certainly supports their whiny claim… and recent events in the race for county prosecutor perhaps explain why the male-to-female shift is taking place: Black female officeholders seem to have more integrity than their Black male counterparts. Read on.

As I’ve written many times before, I believe endorsements (no matter by whom — newspapers, elected officials, clergy, or your local friendly bartender — or on what candidate or issue) are vastly overrated. People will sit in church or at a ward club meeting and nod in agreement as they are told who or what to vote for, and then get inside the voting booth and do as they damn well please. And I say hooray for them, as long as they’ve educated themselves on the candidates or issues on the ballot. But, sadly, in too many cases they simply mark their ballots for the first name they recognize… known locally as “the name game.”

But, I digress. So far I’ve attended four of the debates in the race for county prosecutor (all on the Eastside, and in one case I was one of three moderators), listening intently to the candidates for consistency in their positions on issues. And, so far, none have flip-flopped to any meaningful extent. Attending also gives me a chance to interact with people, to get a sense of how the candidates are being perceived by the electorate.

While support is somewhat generally dispersed between four of the candidates (Chandra, Hall, McDonnell and Triozzi), the lack of support for one, Tim McGinty, among Eastsiders in general, and Black voters in particular, has been consistent at each debate… and seemingly nothing in his message is winning these voters over.

Some Blacks accuse McGinty of being a racist, but that’s an unfair accusation and not based on (or supported by) fact. What is clearly evident from the decade’s long record he’s accumulated as an assistant county prosecutor and then as a judge is that he has a strong proclivity to be ham-handed with the law. He uses it more as a weapon — a cudgel with which to beat down and punish people if you will — than what the law is meant to be used for: a set of rules promulgated to protect society and insure that justice is meted out fairly. But even a cursory examination of McGinty’s career clearly reveals race played no part in his actions or decisions… he was equally brutal on everyone: Black and White, male and female, cop and crook alike. In that sense he’s been eminently fair, but in that sense only.

Read the four cases in which McGinty was charged with prosecutorial misconduct and his problems become crystal clear: He obviously thinks he’s above — knows more, is better than — the law. Most prosecutors go their entire careers without ever being brought up on such charges even once, so, in spite of the fact his actions were deemed “harmless error” (the word “error” being a real misnomer), his actions were not in fact “errors.” The four cases perhaps stand as some sort of state, if not national, record. McGinty, when presented with these findings, dismisses them as no big deal, but that’s just not the case; they are a huge deal as they speak to his temperament, judgment, and sense of fair play.

The transcripts show a consistent, if diabolical, pattern: McGinty would slip in comments that he knew were prejudicial, and, in spite of warnings from judges to cut out the behavior, he sometimes instead would repeat it, literally thumbing his nose at the judge and the Court. In one case, against a police officer accused of theft, McGinty pulled an outrageous stunt: In open court he commented to the jury on the fact the defendant didn’t take the stand in his own behalf (which he meant to infer was proof of the man’s guilt), a statement every first-year law student knows is clearly — and outrageously — against the rules of criminal procedure.

The “harmless error” findings in three of the cases simply meant the other evidence against the defendant was so overwhelming that McGinty’s behavior, although knowingly wrong, didn’t influence the guilty verdict. But what it did show was his complete lack of respect for the rule of law and the Court… a mean-spirited proclivity to pour water on already drowning men. Indeed, even those presumed to be guilty by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence still deserve a fair, untainted trial. Summaries of the cases can be read here.

So, what happened when a group of local Black elected Democrats got together to endorse a candidate in the race? Nothing. It was a stalemate, a draw. The fix was evidently in. The long arm of Georges Forbes (who vacations in Florida every year around this time) seemingly reached back to Cleveland and got all five of the male members of the group present to vote for McGinty (while the female members voted for Subodh Chandra) thus assuring that no candidate would win the endorsement. But why, in spite of the overwhelming enmity felt towards McGinty in the Black community, would they pull such a stunt?

Because they place their own career ambitions ahead of what’s good for their constituents — who one day might be subjected to heavy-handed justice. They want to curry favor with whom they believe will ultimately come out on top in the contest; in politics that’s known as “being with the winner”… any other consideration be damned.

Their specious logic goes like this: “If I support McGinty, that will give me some clout, some influence, with him when I need it.” However there are two problems with such thinking: Who will they use this supposed clout for, and, when and if McGinty is elected he won’t need anyone any longer, so what makes them so sure he’s going to take or return their phone calls… only their overblown, egocentric senses of self-importance?

While Black female politicians have the welfare of their constituents at heart, Black male politicians are still stuck in the ugly, backroom, dirty deal-making past… concerned only with what’s in it for themselves. Wasn’t this the kind of nonsense we thought we voted to fix — to be rid of — with county reform?

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.