Cuyahoga County faces lawsuit for ‘overdetaining’ in jail

CLEVELAND — A potential class-action lawsuit accuses Cuyahoga County of keep- ing nearly 300 people in jail long after they were supposed to be released.

The lawsuit filed in federal court late Thursday said the county continued keeping people behind bars after judges ordered them released or after prosecutors declined to pursue charges.

The issue is a longstanding one at the county. The lawsuit cites cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer’s reporting on the issue in 2018. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb crit- icized the county over the same issue last year and called on the county to reform its practices.

“For at least two years now, Cuyahoga County has been systemically overdetain- ing people in jail after the legal basis for their deten- tion,” said Kate Schwartz, one of several attorneys who filed the case. “It’s a flagrant violation of people’s most fundamental consti- tutional rights to freedom from unwarranted physical detention.”

Tyler Sinclair, a spokes- man for Cuyahoga County, said officials will review the lawsuit once the county has been served. He declined further comment.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Bridget Brennan, who will ultimately decide whether or not to grant class-action status.

The lawsuit was filed by Schwartz and two other attorneys from the Chicago law firm Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym; New York civil rights attorney Akeeb Dami Animashaun; Cleve- land attorney Drew Legando; and attorneys for Justice Catalyst Law, a nonprofit human and civil rights organization.

The group filed the lawsuit on behalf of Alanna Dunn, a Cleveland woman who spent two days in jail after Cleve- land police and prosecutors decided not to press charges against her.

Dunn is one of at least 289 people the lawsuit said has been “overdetained” in 2021 and 2022. Overdetention, in legal terms, is defined as someone who has been imprisoned longer than legally authorized.

Attorneys said they believe many more could have been overdetained in the jail during that time frame because they based their number solely off Cleveland police officers’ arrests.

Cleveland police in 2018 began bringing fresh arrests to the county jail, instead of the city jail, which closed as part of a deal with the county. County officials pushed to house Cleveland’s inmates because they believed it would generate revenue. For each inmate, they charged cities $99 per day while cutting costs for basic inmate care below that amount.

People were overdetained from one day to 56 days, according to the lawsuit. Most months, about a dozen people spent time in jail longer than they were supposed to, although 26 people were overdetained in August 2021 and 21 in December.

The lawsuit said 159 people were kept in the facility longer than they should have been in 2021 and 130 last year.

Schwartz said attorneys based the numbers on monthly reports that showed Cuyahoga Cou nty overbilled the city for inmates who were supposed to have been released.

The number does not include any other police agency that booked inmates into the county jail. Schwartz said she expects that number to grow as attorneys investigate timelines for inmates arrested by suburban police.

“The bottom line is that we know it’s in the hundreds of people ... and we expect that’s just a fraction of the total people impacted,” Schwartz said.

Dunn was initially arrested about 1 a.m. March 30, 2021, and booked into the Cuyahoga County Jail. By 4 p.m., Cleveland police declined to prosecute Dunn and entered that decision into the Law Enforcement Records Management System, an interagency database that helps share information between police officials, including those in the jail.

Dunn had no other reason to be jailed, including no active warrants, the lawsuit said. She remained jailed until about 2:30 p.m. on April 1.