Greene judge to retire in 2013
Robert Hagler has served as probate judge for 40 years.
Greene County XENIA — Probate Judge Robert A. Hagler, Ohio’s longest tenured common pleas judge, announced Friday that he will retire next year.
Hagler, 72, has served as probate judge for 40 years. During his first 20 years on the bench, he was both probate and juvenile judge.
He will retire Feb. 28, 2013, which he said would give Gov. John Kasich plenty of time to take applications and appoint a successor. Hagler’s current term expires in 2015, meaning his successor will be on the 2014 ballot.
Hagler could have run again had voters passed a constitutional amendment on the November 2011 ballot. Under the Ohio Constitution, judges cannot be elected or appointed if they are 70 or older at the start of their six-year term. The amendment would have raised that age to 76.
Hagler said last year that he supported the amendment because people are living longer. But he said then that, even if it passed, he would not run again.
Hagler said Friday he decided to “pass the torch” to someone younger while he is in excellent health and able to spend “quality time” with his family.
He intends to accept special judicial assignments from the Ohio Supreme Court, as many retired judges do.
Hagler graduated from Xenia High School in 1958 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Denison University in 1962. He received his law degree from Ohio State University in 1965.
Hagler was the first recipient of the distinguished George Gounaris Award for outstanding judicial service, presented by the Miami Valley Trial Lawyers Association, and he has received several Superior Judicial Service Awards from the Supreme Court of Ohio.
A Toledo man who was arrested in Tipp City after authorities said he forced a young woman into prostitution was sentenced this week to four years and three months in federal prison.
Rodney Brown, 33, pleaded guilty in January in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio to attempting to violate the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transportation to engage in prostitution, and illegal possession of a firearm.
He originally was indicted on six federal charges, but the other criminal counts were dismissed
Dozens or COLUMBUS — even hundreds of men visited a series of massage parlors for illegal sex in a northeast Ohio city where the women in the businesses, many of them Korean and poor English speakers, may be working against their will, according to search warrants executed on the parlors.
The warrants describe in graphic detail the type and cost of alleged sexual acts at the spas in Warren, just east of Akron, and portray women working long hours who are escorted when they want to go shopping by men dubbed “jockeys.”
The spas are run by an unknown “higher up” who brings the women from Korea to New York to Ohio, where they apparently believe they’ll have a better life than in Korea, according to copies of the search warrants.
A man who acknowledged to investigators he frequented several of the spas monthly said he suspected that some of the women “do not want to