CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office was on pace to prosecute more than 100 children as adults in 2019.

As of December 12, the county’s juvenile court tallied 99 teenagers whose cases had been bound over to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. The court did not provide cleveland.com with current statistics before the end of the day Tuesday.

Nearly 90 percent of those teenagers charged as adults were black, according to court records.

The number marks the second consecutive year that O’Malley’s office sought to send about 100 children to adult court, and continues the dramatic spike in such cases since the 56-year-old Democrat took office in January 2017.

That trend led the ACLU of Ohio in October to criticize O’Malley in an October fact sheet, after it found O’Malley was prosecuting juveniles as adults at a greater clip than any prosecutor in Ohio.

The statistics the ACLU cited, paired with information the juvenile court provided to cleveland.com this month, showed that O’Malley’s office has prosecuted more children as adults in three years than his two predecessors did in the five years before O’Malley took office.

ACLU advisory counsel Claire Chevrier, who worked to compile the data in the fact sheet, told cleveland.com she does not believe that teenagers should necessarily be barred from ever being charged as adults.

“What we’re saying is that prosecuting children like adults is almost never necessary,” she said.

Chevrier said in a statement to cleveland.com on Tuesday that the juvenile court system was built to focus on rehabilitating youth in a way that the adult criminal justice system was not. Sending children to adult court with the threat of adult prison denies them access to those services, Chevrier said.

“When a prosecutor makes the choice to request a discretionary bindover, or chooses to charge in a way they know will lead to a mandatory bindover, the prosecutor is choosing to make our community less safe," Chevrier said. "Binding over a youth to adult court leads to the denial of age-appropriate supports for that youth, and increases the likelihood of trauma and recidivism. We need to treat kids like kids.”

O’Malley contends that many of the children he prosecutes as adults have gone through juvenile court before and committed more crimes.

According to court records, 87 of the 99 juveniles whose cases were bound over to adult court were black. Nine of the juveniles were white, one juvenile was Hispanic, one juvenile’s race was listed in court records as “other,” and another juvenile’s race was not listed.

More than 60 percent of Cuyahoga County residents are white, and about 30 percent are black, according to the U.S. Census.

O’Malley is seeking re-election to a second term in office. No Democrat or Republican filed petitions to have their names on the ballot in the March primary election, meaning any challenger will have to run as either a write-in candidate or as an independent.

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