Judge: Gwinn conviction stands

A judge has ruled that even if former Athens County Democratic Party Chair Susan Gwinn didn't think she was doing anything illegal when she left the names of two donors off a campaign finance report, she still broke the law.

"œThe fact that Gwinn may have thought she was acting lawfully goes to mitigation and is not a defense," wrote Judge William H. Wolff, Jr. "œIgnorance of the law is not an excuse."

The comment came in a March 1 ruling in which Wolff denied Gwinn's request to set aside a verdict in which the judge, after a bench trial, had found Gwinn guilty of two misdemeanor counts of falsifying campaign-finance reports.

Gwinn went to trial on an indictment obtained by special prosecutor Dave Yost of Delaware County, who was hired by Athens County to investigate Gwinn's handling of Democratic Party funds.

She was initially charged with multiple felony counts, but during her trial, Wolff first dropped bribery charges related to alleged vote-buying, then acquitted her of theft-related felonies, leaving only the falsification counts.

These are based on Gwinn's having received over $27,000 from her brother and another man, while she was running for Athens County prosecutor in 2008. Though she apparently used the money on her campaign, she listed it as a personal loan from herself, not mentioning in her finance report the names of the two men who had provided the cash.

After the verdict, Gwinn's attorneys asked Wolff to overturn his own guilty finding, based on an Ohio elections finance regulation that they claim to have discovered only after the trial. This regulation, enacted in 2005, requires that if a candidate takes out a loan to finance a campaign, and is responsible for paying that loan back, then the candidate should list him- or herself, not the party loaning the money, as the donor.

The regulation was apparently meant to keep candidates with great personal wealth from exceeding limits on personal contributions and hiding this fact by using borrowed money they later repay.

Based on this regulation, Gwinn's attorneys argued, she not only didn't break the law by how she filled out her finance report; she would have been breaking the law had she done it differently than she did.

Wolff, however, wrote that the evidence he heard at trial convinced him beyond a reasonable doubt that Gwinn "received and used (the two donors') money for campaign purposes, and that she anticipated doing so when she asked these men to loan her money." Therefore, he concluded, Gwinn should have listed the two men, not herself, as the source of the loan.

Wolff also found unconvincing Gwinn's argument that, because she has an appeal pending before a Franklin County court, of an adverse ruling by the Ohio Elections Commission that relates to the same set of facts as her criminal case, the Athens County Common Pleas Court had no jurisdiction to hear her case.

Wolff concluded that once the OEC issued a finding that Gwinn had violated state elections law, and referred the case to a prosecutor, this cleared the way for the county court to hear her criminal case.

The judge has scheduled sentencing in Gwinn's case for March 19.