LOGAN — The criminal case against Caleb Moritz, former chief deputy in the Hocking County Sheriff’s Office, received a hearing on Friday on two separate motions, one from the prosecution and another from the defense. The case is being presided over by visiting judge Randy Deering.
Moritz was indicted in 2023 on charges of grand theft and intimidation of an attorney, victim, or witness in a criminal case. A superseding indictment in April also charged him with corrupting another with drugs, evidence tampering, unlawful transactions in weapons, forgery, and theft.
On June 27, as reported in the Logan Daily News, Hocking County prosecutor Jennifer Graham filed motions seeking to terminate Cynthia Ellison and Brad Tammaro of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office as special prosecutors in the case. In their place, she sought to appoint Vinton County Prosecutor William Archer.
Between then and now, allegations of a close personal relationship between Moritz and Archer have surfaced — if true, potentially causing a conflict of interest.
It was nonetheless Graham’s position that Ellison’s involvement in the trial was itself a conflict of interest, given Ellison’s previous employment at the Hocking County Prosecutor’s Office, while it was under the leadership of Ryan Black.
Graham has repeatedly expressed her desire to distance her office from Black’s tenure, which ended in resignation in April after a lawsuit was filed alleging sexual discrimination, among several other claims.
Both the originally appointed special prosecutors and the defense took no official position on Graham’s motion, though their arguments ran contrary to a neutral position.
In response to Graham’s point that Ellison was named in the lawsuit against Black, albeit not as a defendant, Tammaro of the Attorney General’s office insisted that the lawsuit had no ties to the Moritz case, and had in any case been dropped earlier this month.
Since Ellison is no longer employed by the Hocking County Prosecutor’s Office, Tammaro continued, any conflict of interest had ceased.
Defense attorney Paul Scarsella, representing Moritz, repeated the defense’s previous objections to Ellison’s involvement, given her role in the original search warrant against Moritz.
After some back and forth, Deering elected to deny Graham’s motion, meaning the trial will proceed with Tammaro and Ellison at the helm for the state.
A separate motion was filed by Scarsella earlier this month for a continuance, pushing the trial back from its scheduled date of Aug. 19.
Scarsella’s motion came as about 1,000 new items of discovery were provided to him in the case, though Tammaro clarified that most were duplicates of items previously revealed — only 110 new items were provided.
The special prosecutors took no position on Scarsella’s motion for a continuance, and Moritz waived his right to a speedy trial.
Judge Deering granted the request, and a new trial date has been set for Oct. 21, to run through Oct. 29.
Email at rmorris@logandaily.com
Most Popular
Comments / 0