CLEVELAND — Editor's note: The video in the player above is from a story on the Mills case published in February 2019.
A jury has found former Cuyahoga County Jail Director Ken Mills guilty of dereliction of duty and falsification.
"Under Mills' watch, drugs flowed freely and medical care did not. Inmates were attacked by corrections officers. With this conviction, Mills can think about his own potential time behind bars – and hope that it will run better than the hellhole he ran for Cuyahoga County," Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost wrote in a Tweet followign the verdict.
Mills will be sentenced on Friday, Oct. 8 at 11:00 a.m. in the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
As 3News reported last summer, the indictment of Mills followed a 2018 report by the U.S. Marshals’ office, which found inmates were being treated inhumanely, including not being given proper medical care. Peter Elliot, U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, called the matter a “serious problem” and that said the system appeared “broken.”
Mills resigned in 2018 after the allegations came to light.
We streamed opening statements in the case, which you can watch in the player below:
An indictment from October 2019 alleges Mills made the jail “unsafe” by failing to “observe any lawful and reasonable regulation for the management of the detention facility.” More specifically, the jury claims he "negligently fail[ed] to provide persons confined in the detention facility with adequate food, clothing, bedding, shelter, and medical attention."
Former Jail Nursing Supervisor, Gary Brack, previously described it this way: "We have paraplegics, quadriplegics in the jail. I have no staff to turn these inmates over every couple of hours to prevent bed sores."
In a hearing over the problems in late 2018, District 2 County Councilman Dale Miller said, "Right now the appearance is that people are dying left and right and nobody cares."
PREVIOUS COVERAGE OF THE CASE: