Yarger enjoys prosecutor job challenges

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

First-term Van Wert County Prosecutor Eva Yarger said there have been some surprises in her first six months in the job, with one of the more pleasant ones being the civil case duties of the position.

“A lot of the civil side is a surprise to me,” Yarger noted, noting that she has gotten a number of questions from township trustees and other agencies for which her office provides legal advice.

Yarger, who had been an assistant prosecutor for nearly 20 years, mostly in the child support and sex crimes area, said she hadn’t done much civil work during that time, and has found it enjoyable, as well as educational.

One case that stood out was a question from a township trustee about what legal recourse a township has to impel a railroad to clean brush from its tracks. Yarger said in researching the case, she found a whole statute on the subject that gives townships the right to fine railroads that don’t keep tracks clean.

“It was very interesting,” she added.

One big improvement to the prosecutor’s office has been Yarger’s purchase of the Matrix Prosecutor software program for use in criminal cases. The software has been a godsend, she noted, allowing her office to quickly generate legal documents and then share them through a portal with defense attorneys and law enforcement officers.

The Matrix program allows prosecutors to plug in names of defendants, victims, and other information related to a criminal case, and the program then generates consistent, professional-looking indictment forms and other legal documents.

The software also includes a searchable Ohio Revised Code that prosecutors can use for researching a case.

Her office has some new assistants, including former defense attorney Kelly Rauch, who now handles mainly child support enforcement cases and appeals; Chuck Koch, who is working part-time on civil cases, such as land bank and foreclosure cases; and veteran attorney Steve Diller, who is helping Yarger with the general criminal prosecuting work, along with his assistant, Tyler Dunham.

Yarger said it is valuable to have former defense attorneys such as Rauch and Diller on her staff, since they know the strategies the defense is likely to come up with, and how to counter them.

One thing that has surprised her a little bit is how much impact drug cases have on her office, noting that she wasn’t involved of many of those cases while an assistant prosecutor.

Yarger pointed to grand jury statistics from the first six months showing at least 67 percent of criminal cases have a connection with drugs, and that statistic goes higher when other substance abuse is factored in, such as domestic violence cases, which are nearly all alcohol-related.

One big bottleneck to prosecuting drug cases is the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI), whose labs perform all the drug tests prosecutors use.

“We’re having trouble with BCI; they’re overworked,” Yarger said, noting that she has pending cases that are months old because of the BCI backload. “I can’t charge anybody until I have the drug test back; I’ve got (pending) cases from last August … November, December … because we don’t have the test back.”

To make things even worse, BCI’s drug testers also have to testify as expert witnesses on substances they test — which also significantly cuts down on the time the staffers can actually test drugs.

To try to deal with the huge backload, BCI is now testing only one item from a specific case, no matter how many different drugs were involved. However, there are still significant delays in getting drug tests back.

Moreover, delays in testing mean drug abusers stay on the street until the drug test comes back, which also can mean suspected drug users are repeat offenders by the time they are indicted.

One big problem with proceeding before drug test are back, Yarger noted, is the possibility of violating a defendant’s constitutional guarantee to receive a speedy trial. Doing so would let some defendants walk because prosecutors couldn’t meet the constitutional deadline.

Meanwhile, Yarger said she and her staff have been focusing more on trying to prosecute higher-level drug traffickers, as well as drug users and small-time drug dealers.

“We’re trying to get a few steps up the ladder,” the prosecutor said.

While the caseload is large, it’s not likely to get any better anytime soon, with drugs continuing to be a significant portion of criminal cases handled by the prosecutor’s office, although an upcoming murder trial in September is also taking time and resources.

Still, Yarger said she is enjoying running the office where she was an assistant for nearly two decades, while admitting the budgetary side of the office has been a learning experience.

Yarger also said she is very pleased to see the level of cooperation between the Van Wert Police Department and the Van Wert County Sheriff’s Office, which she said is a plus for the county.

“That’s a big positive,” she noted.