Interview: Common Pleas Judge Wanda Jones, a Cleveland native, wife and mother of 6, overcame poverty, says over indictments and coercive plea deals can be minimized with a change in the "culture of the court"....By reporter Rhonda Crowder....Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper in Ohio
A one-on-one interview with Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Wanda C. Jones
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio-Judge Wanda C. Jones currently serves as a judge on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas general division bench, a felony court of the state of Ohio that sits in Cleveland, a largely Black city.
She is one of four Black judges out of 34, and all four of those judges, including Jones, are Black women.
Former Ohio Gov John Kasich appointed Jones to the bench in 2018 to complete the unexpired term of common pleas judge Michael P. Donnelly, who was elected to the Ohio Supreme Court that year, Donnelly and former 8th District Court of Appeals judge Melody Stewart, who is Black, and the only Black on the state's highest court, the only Democrats on the seven-member high court court that is mainly Republican, and largely female.
Jones is asking voters to vote for her to retain her judicial seat, early voting of which began in Ohio on Oct 6.
This year’s Nov 3 general election is a historical election for the presidency of the United States of America as a Black woman is running for vice president on the Democratic presidential ticket for the first time in history.
Jones' supporters, including the Black Women's Political Action Committee of greater Cleveland, say she has earned the public's confidence, and that county voters should retain her as judge.
“I have found Judge Wanda Jones to be fair, articulate and knowledgeable of the law,” said Elaine Gohlstin, president of the Black Women’s Political Action Committee of Greater Cleveland. “We are pleased to have endorsed her.”
To her credit, the judge has created partnerships with Wade Park, Mound and Heritage schools to develop a court in the classroom program.
“Every time I have these interactions with these kids and build these relationships with these kids, they can know if they want to go to school and become a judge, that they can too," she said.
Both her critics and supporters have said she has been effective in reducing her case docket while also receiving a number of new cases during the coronavirus pandemic, a pandemic that has seen some 213,000 Americans lose their lives since it began vastly sweeping the country in early March.
As the November election nears, Judge Jones, 49, is rated excellent by both the Cuyahoga Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association and she garnered a preferred rating from the Norman S. Minor Bar Association, an organization of Black lawyers.
She is endorsed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, among a host of other endorsements.
A Cleveland native and a married mother of six who found love again with her second husband, she was once a single mother.
She understands the struggle of single motherhood and what it means to grow up poor, and Black.
She grew up primarily in the historic Glenville Neighborhood on Cleveland's majority Black east side with her two siblings, and under the guidance of a divorced, single-parent mother who drove a school bus for a living but was stern and wanted the best for her children like most parents.
The way she describes it, life was no crystal staircase.
“We were poor," the judge said. "It was not uncommon for the gas to be turned off in the summertime."
The judge continued, "we had to take cold showers, because my mother had to stretch money. We got food stamps. It was a struggle.”
Jones graduated from Glenville High School in 1990 and was accepted to Clark University in Atlanta that same year.
But she couldn’t afford to go to college, more less an out of state college with higher tuition and room and board, so instead, she ultimately enrolled at Cleveland State University, and she worked at Society Bank and went to school at the same time.
At Society Bank she quickly rose through the ranks to become a supervisor, all while continuing to further her education.
And when KeyBank bought out Society, she left to work at the U.S. post office as a mail carrier.
“I was like, I need job security the post office provides, and I need to work for a union so I don’t have to worry about losing my job,” Jones said.
Being a mail carrier, however, was just not her thing.
"I was a terrible mail lady but I had a lot of time to think, and I decided I needed to go back to school," said Jones.
She was later employed with MBNA corporation, a bank holding company that hired her on the spot and offered tuition reimbursement, which allowed her to finish her undergraduate degree at Ursuline College, and on the company's dime.
From there, she decided to go to law school, even though she was a mother of three by then, and a wife.
“I had become a mother of three by then, said Jones "So, at the time, I’m thinking I need some job security and I need to make enough money to support my family.”
As she finished law school, MBNA went through a buyout and at the same time she was going through a divorce from her first husband.
Jones ended up working as a preschool teacher while awaiting her bar exam results and after having difficulty finding a job in the legal profession as a neophyte she decided to branch out on her own.
“I started my own firm because I couldn’t find a job,” she said. “I applied everywhere.”
She took on her first client immediately after being sworn in as a licensed attorney.
Jones' admirers say her judicial philosophy is rooted in fairness, respect and compassion, and she agrees.
“If you want to know what kind of judge someone is, you can ask any defendant who has spent some time in the justice center," Jones said. "They pretty much know the reputations of all the judges.”
Jones said that defendants will often let each other and others know what kind of chance they have when a judge’s name is mentioned,
"I thought early on what I wanted people to say about me when I wasn’t there and the first words that I would want them to say is that I’m fair."
In spite of her fairness, she is also a tough judge when necessary.
"I am fair, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be consequences for committing a crime," the judge said.
Whether its a criminal case or civil case she carefully listens to both sides of the controversy.
She then looks at the evidence and relevant authorities before making a decision.
Several legal system issues are important to the judge.
Fair sentencing is one of them, she said, acknowledging the discretion that judges in Ohio have relative to sentencing, and the power that comes with that privilege.
“As a judge, that doesn’t mean you have to sentence exactly the same in each case because each case is going to have something factually different," said Jones, who added that life experiences sometimes effect how a judge rules or sees a particular situation.
Ohio judges are bound by judicial canons, and other applicable authorities
She believes judges have an obligation to pursue justice, not just convictions, and that over indicting a defendant is a huge problem.
Over indictments of defendants, most of them Black in Cuyahoga County, which is 29 percent Black, is routinely synonymous with coercive plea deals
“They go hand and hand," said Jones " If a person is overcharged [indicted], all that stuff gets exacerbated, such as bigger bonds, a bigger threat to the community, and so on, and it drags the case out longer."
Injustice can also gets costly, she said.
"It’s how the coercive plea comes into play," said Jones. "After sitting in county jail, four or five months, and sometime longer, they’re ready to get out.”
Data show that Blacks and poor people are disproportionately indicted, prosecuted and sentenced in Cuyahoga County, the second largest of Ohio's 88 countries.
And while there have been a few reforms, little has been done as the county's jail a disgrace and in the national news behind some 10 inmate deaths in a two-year span, many of the deaths unexplained as the FBI continues to swarm the jail and top officials like the former ward and former jail director fight criminal charges themselves.
The judge said she also believes body camera video should automatically be provided to the grand jury for jurors to review, saying it would probably reduce the amount of unnecessary indictments.
She attributes this phenomena, a prime example of over indicting coercive pleas deals by prosecutors as to representing “the culture of the court.”
Unless efforts are made to change the culture of the court disparities will linger, said Jones
"That’s the only thing that’s going to change it,” she said.
She is a strong proponent of rehabilitation as well.
“Rehab is always the goal, but so is protecting the public," Jones said.
With Covid-19 running raid, some support programs have been suspended in prisons in Ohio, and this concerns the judge.
She feels inmates should get skills they lack while locked up.
“You want people to come out of prison who can integrate into society and who function well,” she said.
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