When Justice Is Too Expensive for Citizens (Yet Cheap for the Powerful)

Jon Paul Rion’s (Mike Foley’s lawyer) latest brief in the Quo Warranto case reads like a personal attack on me. Instead of addressing the law, he calls my filing “self-indulgent,” a “tirade,” and “legal babbling.” He claims it is a “personal vendetta” and even suggests my use of Quo Warranto was part of the “manifest injustice” justifying Foley’s plea withdrawal. That is not just wrong, it is offensive. Citizens are supposed to have the right to challenge corruption through Quo Warranto. It is not an injustice, it is the law.

Foley was ineligible the moment he was sentenced

The fact remains simple. On June 17, 2025, Foley entered a no contest plea on 2 of the 12 charges, was sentenced, and community control sanctions were imposed. One was a Felony 5, which automatically, under Ohio law immediately disqualified him from holding office. That disqualification cannot be undone by a later plea withdrawal. At best, what Judge Hein did on July 2 was erase the paper trail, but it cannot erase the two weeks Foley sat as Clerk while legally ineligible.

Illegal deals dressed up as contracts

Rion and Hein both lean on the idea that the plea agreement was a “contract” that promised no collateral consequences. But you cannot contract around a statute. The promise to protect Foley’s elected office was never enforceable, because Ohio law does not allow convicted felons to hold public office. Calling it a “contract” does not make it legal. Hein’s decision to allow the withdrawal rests on an illegal premise. The fact that the Judge, the defense attorney and the state prosecution all didn’t realize the illegality of this argument is grounds for all of them to be disbarred.

Confidentiality as a shield has already failed

In his reply, Rion lectures that “it is essential that plea negotiations remain confidential to the parties” and attacks me for daring to point out the secrecy surrounding Foley’s deal. Yet only last week Judge Hein ruled against Foley on his claim of attorney-client privilege with Tyler Starline. Hein found that Starline was not Foley’s lawyer and that even if he were, the crime-fraud exception applied. In other words, secrecy cannot be used to conceal corruption.

This idea of politicians who commit crimes in office are somehow granted privacy or protection goes against Senate of Puerto Rico vs DOJ in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg admonished the government for trying to use the secrecy of a grand jury as a veil to hide the guilt of government officials.

A pattern of lawless impunity

This case fits a pattern we have seen again and again in Montgomery County. The Joey Williams case is the clearest example. Williams was a Dayton City Commissioner who was caught on FBI tape taking bribes. The FBI and DOJ sat on that evidence for years, allowing him to stay in office and continue casting votes (while supposedly working as a “Confidential Human Source.” By law, that delay amounts to Misprision of a felony. I have been pointing out that the public was being denied accountability while Williams continued to govern under the cloud of an indictment that never came until after he’d run for re-election, won, and resigned shortly after. When charges finally landed, he got a sweet heart deal that kept him in prison long enough to make a mockery of the system (3 months of only a year long sentence).

The same pattern played out with former prosecutor John Amos. Accused of rape, he remained on the job for years, collecting raises and prosecuting cases, until the day he was indicted. By then, four felony counts were quietly dropped and he pled down to misdemeanors. He served thirty days in jail. The victim himself said it best: “It shouldn’t be this hard to find people in the justice system who care about justice.”

Or look at the recent Board of Elections action, turning a blind eye to Daj’za Demmings running from an address where she didn’t actually live. Enforcement is optional, apparently, depending on who you are.

The Foley–Piergies contrast

Foley is still drawing a paycheck as Clerk of Courts today. He is back on the docket in December to face all twelve charges in front of Judge Hein, the same judge who already bent the rules for him. Meanwhile, his accomplice in four of those charges, Judge James Piergies, had to “retire” immediately when his role was exposed in the scheme to get Foley to hire Piergies’ son. Why one keeps collecting a salary while the other is gone says everything about selective enforcement. Our tax dollars are paying Foley so he can continue to pay Rion, while in office illegally.

The real injustice

Rion calls my brief “self-gratuitous” and “legal nonsense.” That sort of language reveals more about his case than it does about mine. When lawyers resort to insults, it is because they cannot win on the law. The bigger problem is that they can still win on procedure, delay, and the complacency of a system that rarely polices itself.

The true injustice here is that ordinary citizens are forced to bear the cost of accountability. Filing fees, legal research, time, and lost work are all on me, unrecoverable. That is how the system is designed. Prosecutors pick and choose who they will charge. Judges bend rules to protect insiders. And when citizens step in, we are treated as cranks, attacked for daring to use the very tools the law provides. At a minimum, the people filing should be entitled to a judgement against Foley for his government pay that he’s been collecting illegally – a whistle blower incentive.

When prosecutors ignore misconduct, when elections boards shrug at fraud, when judges rewrite rules after sentencing, what we have is not justice but lawlessness. And when the only way to enforce the law is for private citizens to go broke doing it, justice belongs only to the wealthy. That is the truth Rion’s insults cannot cover up.

Now we wait for the panel to decide to hear the case. I asked for a hearing, we’ll see if I get one.