Lawless or above law?

If it were a game of "chicken" we might be able to understand it more thoroughly. If it were a triple-dog dare, maybe. But it's not that. It's nothing trivial, at all. Whether a judge can sideline the elected and duly authorized clerk of courts and appoint a crony the duties clearly assigned and spelled out in state law is an important question. Whether the criminal case brought against a court official — now ex-prosecutor Tim Braun — was tainted or fixed to soften the blow and minimize his crimes also must be answered. That question, too, must be more thoroughly vetted than what seems already apparent — that yes, it was a fixed case. And, how weapons went missing from an evidence room at the courthouse and how they were mysteriously returned, if indeed they were, are more questions that must be answered if the court is ever going to restore its integrity and regain the public trust it must have to function, properly. These issues go to the very heart of the "rule of law," and who gets to make those laws and who is required to follow them. Resigning and denying that there's a problem — as Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge John Dewey announced is his intention — is not a resolution. Dewey has claimed his secret appointment of court administrator Brock Kimmet to serve as clerk over the criminal case of their friend and courthouse associate Braun is OK because he's done it before, or the court has. But the law is the law, and those questions, boiled down, are simple: Is a judge above the law? Could he appoint a mayor the same way he appointed a clerk, supplanting the elected officeholder for his own choice? The missing evidence — mysteriously gone and mysteriously recovered, perhaps — also represents a black mark on the court's integrity card. If the public cannot trust the court to hold evidence in criminal cases in a proper manner, it cannot trust the court with anything. It's great that there is a newspaper — this one — bringing these questions to the public officials responsible for the areas of concern where they reside. The public should not look away, however, when half-answers are provided, or nonsensical explanations are given that challenge the notion of common sense. And our public institutions — the Ohio Attorney General, the Ohio Disciplinary Counsel and the state's Supreme Court — must not shirk from the need to restore trust within the court system in Sandusky County. If these questions are not answered in a full and transparent way, those three institutions will be complicit, and the damage will extend to every courthouse in Ohio.