CLEVELAND — Andre Bacsa, a former Cuyahoga County corrections officer, has been sentenced to four years in prison on multiple sex crime charges within the county jail.
The sentence, which was handed down Thursday morning, comes after Bacsa pleaded guilty to the following charges on March 16:
- Two counts of Sexual Battery
- One count of Sexual Imposition
- One count of Unlawful Restraint
Bacsa, 35, will also be listed as a Tier III sex offender, which the court says is a lifetime designation that requires him to register every 90 days.
Before the judge issued the sentence, Bacsa made a statement. Here’s a portion of what he had to say:
“I just want to let you guys know that I’m not a cold and calculating type of person,” he said. “I happen to look like one. I’m a big, bald white guy with tattoos and everything, but the kind of relationships I had in the jail I was always trying to either talk about people’s drug addictions, issues with their family, issues with this, issues with that, any religious issues that they were having, all kinds of stuff. You spend 12 or 16 hours in the jail with the same people pretty much every day. You get moved around a little bit, but my main goal when I became a corrections officer was to help rehabilitate people and make their lives better in hopes they wouldn’t keep offending and keep coming back to jail. My nerves are getting me now, so that’s pretty much all I wanted to say. I knew these guys like they were my best friends.”
Judge Joan Synenberg immediately replied with the following response to Bacsa’s remarks:
“They’re not your best friends. You lost your way. You were not there to have relationships with them. You were their keeper. You were there to protect them. You were there in a position of power and trust in a uniform with a badge in an unlevel playing field. You’re not there to bring them food to cook with them. The lines aren’t blurred, you completely crossed them.”
Bacsa was arrested in the case last summer.
“The care and protection of our jail detainees is of paramount concern,” Cuyahoga County Sheriff Christopher Paul Viland said in a statement last June. “It is never acceptable to violate people’s rights as an employee of the Sheriff’s Department, and we continue with our pledge to proactively ensure that our staff serves at a high standard and is held strictly accountable.”
He was hired for the job back on March 18, 2019.
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Editor's note: Video in the player above was originally published in an unrelated story on Feb. 23, 2022.