As special agents with the law enforcement arm of the Ohio Attorney General’s office conducted its criminal probe of the high-profile police killing of Jazmir Tucker late last year, a veteran City of Akron attorney was in the room during the first and only time the investigators questioned Officer Davon Fields and two of the officers present when Fields gunned down the 15-year-old on Thanksgiving night.
A municipal attorney had never before been documented in an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation interview of an officer under investigation for homicide. The BCI did not document why City of Akron Assistant Director of Law Christopher Reece was there or if the officers asked for him to be there. His presence jeopardized the admissibility of the officers’ testimony if charges were filed against them and circumvented the agency’s guidelines warning of the “potential landmine” of employer involvement in criminal cases. It also had the potential to influence officer testimony, multiple attorneys told Signal Akron.
Mahoning County prosecutors presented the evidence gathered by BCI to a Summit County grand jury earlier this month. The grand jury declined to indict Fields for murder, the only charge presented to them.
“It was a corruption of the process and I am, frankly, shocked that anyone at BCI let that happen,” said attorney Subodh Chandra, who reviewed the documents obtained by Signal Akron that showed that Reece was in the interviews. Chandra previously served as the City of Cleveland’s law director before becoming a prominent civil rights attorney. He represented Tamir Rice’s family in their lawsuit against Cleveland (he is not representing Tucker’s family)…