Ex-police chief wants sex counts expunged

4-10-2012 Ohio:

County's legal reviewer opposed

For 11 days in 2003, Jeremy Alley served as the top cop in the little village of Elmwood Place. Then he was branded a sex criminal.

Alley was busted for using his police department computer to proposition someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl – but Alley was actually online chatting with a police officer pretending to be a teen.

Now Alley wants a Hamilton County judge to wipe away his five sex-related convictions.

In a rare move, prosecutors are fighting Alley’s expungement request. A hearing is set today before Common Pleas Judge Norbert Nadel.

The situation is unusual, says Assistant Prosecutor Scott Heenan: “It’s not every day you have a police chief do this and then later try to erase it.”

Heenan, who is in charge of reviewing felony expungement applications in Hamilton County, estimated he sees 500 to 1,000 such cases each year. He allows at least 90 percent of them to pass without a challenge, and generally throws up hurdles only when a background check reveals that the person isn’t a first-time offender, as Ohio law requires.

“Usually, expungements are very black-and-white; either you’re eligible or you’re not,” Heenan said. “This is one of the cases that falls into a gray area.”

Because of a wrinkle in Ohio law, there’s a dispute as to whether Alley’s situation qualifies for expungement.

Even if Alley is eligible, Heenan argues “the very nature of this crime cries out against granting an expungement.”

“Alley was not just some random person who hopped onto the Internet to solicit sex from children. He was a police officer. And not just any police officer – he was the chief. And he was soliciting sex using police computers,” Heenan wrote in an objection to Alley’s expungement application. “How a greater abuse of the trust that was placed (in) him could ever possibly occur defies imagination.”

However, Christo Lassiter, a University of Cincinnati law professor, said that if the judge decides Alley’s case meets eligibility requirements, the way Alley has conducted himself after the case ought to be considered. ..For the rest of the story: by Janice Morse