CINCINNATI — Attorneys are criticizing a Cincinnati federal judge for neglecting his criminal cases, keeping a dead person on his docket, and ignoring inmates who filed emergency motions for release during the COVID-19 pandemic for several years.
The I-Team first reported on U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black in September, after he took the rare step of dismissing child pornography charges against a Clermont County man because the case had languished on his criminal docket for too long.
Eric Michael Schuster spent more than seven years, mostly in the Butler County Jail, waiting for trial and for Black to rule on his motions. He stayed in his cell for up to 23 hours a day and had no face-to-face visitors beside his attorneys, during that time.
“He has not seen the sun since Barack Obama was president,” said Schuster’s attorney, Bill Gallagher, in September. “In all of my years of practice I know of no one who has sat there as long as he has sat there.”
Gallagher said it exposed a pattern of extremely slow decision-making by Black on criminal cases since at least 2018.
Now the I-Team has discovered that Black ignored motions filed by many inmates with health problems who urgently asked for release from prison during the peak of the pandemic, for as long as three years.
Black finally took action in the days before and after Christmas 2023, denying motions from 15 defendants. Some motions were so old, that they had become moot because the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had already released inmates months or years prior. Yet Black still carried them as active cases on his criminal docket.
In the cases of inmates who were still in prison, Black reasoned in part, that they did not need early release because COVID was no longer a problem inside of their facilities.
“The reason it’s called compassionate release is because there’s an immediacy to it. Addressing the immediate need three years later, is just wrong,” said attorney Jay Clark. “There is no timetable, no time limit, no deadline that the judges have to meet, but there has to be some measure of reason.”
One of those cases involved Norman Kuhbander, who is serving a 15-year sentence for his role in a methamphetamine ring. He suffers from heart failure, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and has had repeated heart attacks while in prison. He caught COVID twice and was in the intensive care unit for weeks, according to court records.
“I simply cannot wait any longer. I am dying,” Kuhbander wrote in a handwritten letter to his attorney, Angela Glaser, last May, which was subsequently added to his court record. “My heart function is declining at rapid rate. We need to move forward immediately.”
Kuhbander first filed an emergency motion for early release in June 2020. Black appointed Glaser as his attorney, and she filed a second motion in November 2020 on his behalf.
Three years later, in July 2023, after no response from Black, Kuhbander sent a handwritten emergency motion to Black asking for a new attorney because Glaser wasn’t doing enough to help him as his “medical condition and circumstances have progressed to a critical life-threatening stage.”
“It was so bad that the gentleman couldn’t believe it was the judge’s fault,” Gallagher said. “In fact, he blamed the lawyer and threatened to have the lawyer disciplined because the only thing in this inmate’s mind was – ‘no judge acts like this, it has to be the lawyer’s fault.’ And it wasn’t.”
On December 21, Black denied Kuhbander’s motion – three and a half years after he first filed it.
“The medical records demonstrate that defendant has been consistently monitored by medical professionals and received extensive care for his conditions while incarcerated,” Black wrote. “Moreover, COVID-19 appears to be well-controlled at defendants’ current facility … as of Dec. 20, 2023, there were no active COVID-19 cases reported within the facility.”
Since Kuhbander was part of a large crystal methamphetamine trafficking organization in Cincinnati, who also had numerous illegal guns in his home, Black wrote “the nature and circumstances of the offense weigh against release.”
Gallagher and Clark did not take issue with Black’s decisions – just the extreme length of time that inmates had to wait for his rulings.
Of the 15 motions that Black denied in late December, all but one had been outstanding for at least 22 months and most for three years or longer.
“They’re there (in prison) because these are serious offenses. But they’re still human beings, and I think that gets lost,” Clark said.
Clark has also experienced long delays from Black on some of his criminal cases. One client, Frank Frazier, waited more than five years for a sentencing hearing.
And another, Abdullah Luqman, died nearly a year ago but his criminal charge for selling fake luxury sneakers and sunglasses still appears as an open and active case on Black’s docket. This despite an attorney filing his death certificate and notice with the court in November.
“I am without an explanation to understand what appears to be the uncaring nature in the last three, four, five years for people who find themselves on his criminal docket,” said Gallagher, who was the first to raise questions about Black in September, and spoke to the I-Team again after recent cases, “caused him further alarm in terms of what I’ve been seeing over the past few years with this judge.”
Black did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Attorney’s office also declined to comment.
Clark and Gallagher, who have both been lawyers in Cincinnati for decades, said that Black has a reputation as an empathetic, skilled, fair judge, but in recent years he has given little attention to his criminal docket. It has prompted quiet complaints from dozens of defense attorneys and prosecutors, they both said.
“I’ve never met a prosecutor, a defender, or a staff member within the court system that has attempted to defend, justify, or come to his aid in terms of ‘this is okay,’" said Gallagher, who estimated that more than 50 people agree with him.
Gallagher’s client, Pedro Mendoza, who is serving 14 years in prison for his role in a heroin trafficking operation, filed a motion himself in July 2020, asking for early release due to health conditions such as high cholesterol, seizure disorder and chronic gum disease. Black appointed Gallagher to be Mendoza’s lawyer, and he filed a reply on his behalf in December 2020.
“In our prisons people were dying at a greater rate than they were in the general public, so a lot of inmates, including Pedro, filed motions to the court saying, ‘I have these underlying conditions, COVID is rampant, people are dying, I’m afraid something bad is going to happen to me, would you consider letting me out because of that,’” Gallagher said.
Mendoza waited three years for a response from Black. During that time, he and his family asked Gallagher why the judge never ruled. Gallagher said he repeatedly contacted Black’s chambers and was told, “it’s pending before the judge, it’s under advisement.”
Black denied the motion on Dec. 21: “Moreover, COVID-19 appears to be well-controlled at defendant’s current facility … as of December 20, 2023, there were no active cases.”
Mendoza is still in prison, with an expected release date of 2025; so is Kuhbander, who is set for release in 2031.
“I’m just really happy no one died … I’m at least relieved that no one’s medical condition was ignored by the judge and then as a result they caught COVID and passed away,” Gallagher said. “I at least find solace in that that no one was physically harmed by his inactivity.”
To date, Gallagher said he has not filed a complaint against Black with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He doubts that federal judges would discipline one of their own, and they have life appointments.
Gallagher, who is co-founder and advisor for the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati and past president of the Greater Cincinnati Defense Lawyers Association, did not say if he intended to file a complaint against Black in the future.
Clark suggested that the court could simply reassign Black’s criminal cases to other judges.
Another option is to just let the issue go, Gallagher said, since Black retired from active service as a judge in 2022 and now works in a reduced capacity as a senior judge.
“Those are really the only two things that I think can be done – to let it go or to make some sort of formal complaint. Or wait to see maybe if there is fallout from this story,” Gallagher said. “Maybe it could force other people to make decisions, just based on the story itself.”
