Jeffrey Aberegg soon will be able to return to Wadsworth without having to worry about being arrested just for being within city limits.
Posted on 08/05/2010 8:54:28 AM PDT by JoeProBono
WADSWORTH, Ohio -- Jeffrey Aberegg hasn't set foot in his former hometown in nearly two years and would have been arrested on sight if he had.
A Wadsworth Municipal judge ordered Aberegg on Sept. 26, 2008, not to go on Wadsworth property after ruling that he was a nuisance. But the judge's order went too far, Aberegg's lawyer argued to the 9th Ohio District Court of Appeals. The appeals court has not ruled on the request but it doesn't have to.
Share The city agrees that Aberegg must be re-sentenced. He still won't be allowed to enter Wadsworth governmental offices, but he will be allowed back into the city where he lived from 1988 to 2003.
"I have not been able to go to the parade in Wadsworth for years," he said. "I miss that. I'm a handyman and I get calls from people in Wadsworth to do work, but I have to turn them down. It will be good to be able to go back into the city when I want to. I want closure."
The trouble started in 2001 when Aberegg was going though a difficult divorce and other problems, including thefts from his handyman business. Aberegg, 50, of Barberton, admits that he was a bit insistent when he repeatedly contacted the Wadsworth police and the law director to complain about inaction by police on his complaints against his ex-wife and others he believe wronged him.
He also filed numerous lawsuits against the city and others.
The city said the calls were "bizarre and threatening on some occasions" and so frequent that they interfered with the city's office staff getting work done.
Law Director Page Schrock III ordered Aberegg to stop calling city offices and warned that he would be arrested for harassment if he called again.
Aberegg believes his letters of complaint to the FBI and the Ohio attorney general's office about the official inaction prompted the warning.
Schrock's office denies that.
Aberegg said he complied, mostly, after receiving the warning. But he admitted calling the city a few more times. Then, he left a message in 2008 at the law director's office demanding the city compensate him for losses he suffered because of a false arrest.
That's when the city carried out its threat.
Aberegg was arrested for telecommunications harassment in May 2008. A jury convicted him four months later in Wadsworth Municipal Court. Judge Stephen McIlvaine suspended a jail sentence but, as condition of probation, ordered Aberegg to stay away.
"For the next five years, [Aberegg is] not to be on any property owned or operated by the city of Wadsworth including, but not limited to, City Hall, transfer station, WCTV, sanitary, engineering, fire station, police station or city parks," the judge ordered. "He shall not call any city of Wadsworth office."
Aberegg's original lawyer did not bring up the unusual sentence in his appeal, but it came to the attention of the public defender's office in Columbus. They asked in January that the appeal be reopened, calling the sentence a "miscarriage of justice because banishment is so far outside of the normal and appropriate community-controlled conditions. Banishment simply cannot be ignored on appeal."
"The judge ordered that he cannot set foot on any property at all owned by the city of Wadsworth," said Spencer Cahoon of the Ohio public defender's office. "My reading was that he was not to set foot in the city itself, since that would include the streets and sidewalks. If he did, he could have gone to prison."
"He was banished from the city," he added. "We really don't do that in the criminal court system........"
Jeffrey Aberegg soon will be able to return to Wadsworth without having to worry about being arrested just for being within city limits.
Geez ... he looks like such a pleasant fellow, too ...
People get banished from judicial circuits all the time.
I wish it were the other way around. There’s some judges who need banishment.
Reminds me of the Athenian practice of ostracism: If you were such a nuisance that your fellow citizens wanted you gone, you were banished from the city for 10 years.
It’s a good way to keep the peace. Too bad it’s gone by the wayside - officially, anyway.
That’s called election time! Too bad people check the “incumbent” or “retain” box at election time. I do the opposite. Throw them all out.
I have to rethink my voting on judges. Basically Iif I haven’t heard any outrageous decisions or scandal I vote for the incumbant. I think their’s a differnece between my local crinminal court judge and the idiots we read about daily.
You’re probably right. For the most part(as a whole), judges get better with experience. They enter the job as a blank slate. Judges usually screw themselves somehow.
Rather than being upset about not being able to enter one town, this lunatic should be glad that he’s not prevented from going anywhere outside an asylum.
ROTFL!! That was my very FIRST thought, on reading the headline!! What a great movie; not a throwaway line in it!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.