
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
The prosecuting attorney of Hamilton County is sitting at a table in his office, looking pretty much like he always does: half smoove and half square. The tie is yellow and looks to be silk, the suit didnât come cheap. The shave is down below the level of rumors and the skin tone is healthy creamsicle. Heâs doing OK.
Joe Deters has an audience first thing this day: a journalist, Detersâs public information officer, and two interns who will be sitting in on the morningâs conversation. To get started, Deters mentions the amazing thing he saw on TV that morning, asking, âHey, did anybody else see this?â Your basic top-of-the-morning conversational gambit, except that what Deters saw was what millions of other people across the country saw in the previous few hours: a Baton Rouge police officer firing his gun into an African-American street vendor, killing him.
Itâs a topic that nobody sitting around the table feels much like taking a poke at, other than sighing and gasping and indicating that, yup, I saw it too. âThey shot this guy in the back on the ground. Theyâve got him down on the ground, one of them pulls a gun and he shoots him in the back!â He says it with genuine surprise, a reasonable response to viewing the footage of 37-year-old Alton Sterlingâs last moments. The Justice Department is investigating.
âYou know, when the government gives you a badge and a gun, thatâs almost sacred,â he says.
Nobody else around the table quite knows what to say. Deters is soon to try former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing for the shooting death of Samuel DuBose, an African-American pulled over for driving without a front license plate. Deters has charged Tensing with murder and voluntary manslaughter. The trial has been set for October 25.
For reasons that have continued to startle many observers who have watched Deters run the prosecutorâs office since the 1990s, he has taken this case extremely personallyâthe law and order prosecutor of Hamilton County prosecuting a white law enforcement official for murder. Asked if heâs considering a plea bargain, he shakes his head no. âWeâre preparing for jury selection,â says Deters.
It is, in assorted ways, autumn for the public Joe Deters. He is the longest-serving prosecutor Hamilton County has ever had, clocking 17 years in the job over two stints. His name is so popular in the county his brother has borrowed it to run for county commissioner, prominently displaying his first, middle, and last name on the ballotâDennis Joseph Deters. Still, you may be surprised to hear the real Joe Deters is running again for the office of prosecutor in November. Not because you thought he wasnât going to, but because there has been absolutely no sense that there was even a contest, or any prominent Democrat willing to run against him. (Does the name Alan Triggs ring a bell?) Deters will win, but itâs far from clear he will finish out his final term. Even Deters acknowledges this is likely to be a one-and-done deal: win one more, and then, if rumors are correct, resign and pick his successor.
âIâm getting ready to retire, so look, I feel sorry for my kids,â he says. âAt this point every day that I work I lose like 50 dollars. Itâs true. You know, [former county prosecutor] Si Leis told me this is a young manâs job. At some point youâve got to walk away from it.â He adds, âI could be in congress, I could have been a judge. Nothing appeals to meâŠ.â
And so it is all the more striking that the man who has built a reputation as a fierce defender of police officers could go out with the Tensing case as his last big trial. The timing is uncanny: Deters has found a way to get everybodyâs attention yet again, at a time when he might just as well put his feet up and order out lunch for the next couple of years.
On another morning, deters is on the phone with former Hamilton County Commissioner Greg Hartmann, talking about how they can help Dennis succeed in his slot as Hartmannâs successor. (The log rolls both ways: Hartmann has been mentioned as a contender to be Detersâs eventual successor.)
After he gets off the phone, he settles onto a couch. The upcoming trial is always a presence, and itâs made for some weird encounters, Deters says. About a week before, he was in a Bob Evans, in shorts and T-shirt and golf hat, when an elderly black man sitting next to him leaned over. âHey, are you Deters?â he asked. Yes. âAnd he literally had tears in his eyes, talking about this case.â
Strange days. When the call came in on July 19, 2015, from chief assistant prosecuting attorney Mark Piepmeier, Deters was vacationing in Charlevoix, Michigan, with his 11-year-old son. âWe got a problem,â Piepmeier said.
Ever since 2001âwhen Cincinnati police officer Stephen Roach shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed 19-year-old black man, triggering riots and a federal investigationâitâs been city policy to have a representative of the prosecutorâs office on the scene whenever a police officer fires on somebody. Piepmeier says he has been to more than 50 such scenes over the last 15 years.
âI remember it was hotter than hell when I got the call,â Piepmeier says. âYou get pretty good at assessing things when youâre at the scene, and the majority of times itâs a good, clean shooting. Then you go back to homicide and are present at all the interviews. I was present on the scene and called Joe right away and said, âJoe, this one doesnât look good.â And itâs rare for me to say that.â
Piepmeier told Deters there was video from Tensingâs bodycam that he needed to look at. It was too sensitive to transmit via internet; the investigator slipped a disc into an envelope and FedExed it to Northern Michigan. Deters put the disc in his computer. âI looked at this and went âOh fuck. We have a bad one,ââ Deters recalled. âNo one wants to go after a cop, not in my job, at least, but it was a bad shoot. It was bad. I called Mark, told him what I thought, and he said, âThatâs exactly what I thought.â I really had no conversations with anyone after that.â
The possibility of unrest, says Deters, isnât something he can think about. âI canât deal with that. Itâs not my role. Thatâs for Cranley and those other people,â he says. âI swore to uphold the law and Iâm gonna do it.â
The shooting quickly became national news. People thought anything might happenâespecially if there were no charges brought against the UC police officer. Baltimore was burning following the death of Freddie Gray, a black man arrested for possession of a switchblade, who ended up with a broken neck after taking a ride in a police van. About 350 miles due west, Ferguson, Missouri, was still boiling in the wake of Michael Brownâs death at the hands of a white police officer.
Still, Deters refused to release the bodycam video until the grand jury had delivered its decision, and because he didnât want Tensing to couch his statements based on the footage. The tension in the city was palpable, and officials were feeling it. When Deters finally made the video public, during the July 29 press conference announcing the indictmentâabout as bad a video as anybody has seen, in an era of bad videosâyou could feel the whole city holding its breath. Nobody knew what would happen next. Except Deters. When he made it clear heâd be charging Tensing, a cop, with murder, a lot of people on all sides did not see that coming. But you could almost feel them collectively breathe a sigh of relief.
Deters shrugs. âI ran into the mayorâIâve known him from high school on, and John [Cranley] said to me, âYou saved the city from riots.â I said, âThatâs not why I did it; I did it because itâs the right thing to doâŠââ Which, he says, is what he said to the guy at Bob Evans who was trying to thank him: âIt was the right thing to do.â
âA lot of people said âDonât try itâlet us do it, you donât need to alienate people in law enforcement,ââ he says. âThe people I know in law enforcement who I respect and are good cops say, âYouâre doing the right thing.â That gives me a lot of comfort.â
Albert Johnson is a 48-year-old concerned citizenâexactly how he wanted to be identifiedâwho has a message for Deters. But to get to the message, I first have to wrap my mind around a metaphor Johnson has been working on for a good part of this warm, summer day.
He asks me to think about Deters being the cook in a kitchen baking a cake. Johnson is very specific about this: It is a banana nut cake. Johnson has questions. Are you putting the right ingredients in? The jury is going to slice that cake and make a decisionâare there bananas in there? Did you remember to put the chocolate chips in? Johnsonâs point is that a person canât just say they are going to do something; they have to go all the way, follow through. And they must succeed.
Itâs another July day hotter than hellâs kitchen and Iâm talking to Johnson in Classon Park, on the University of Cincinnati campus, where a small group of protesters are marking Samuel DuBoseâs death exactly a year ago by demanding that justice be served. Just the day before, in Baltimore, charges were dropped against the third of six cops involved in the death of Freddie Gray. And concerned citizen Albert Johnson makes clear he isnât just talking about baking. Itâs a high stakes contest; you either win or not. Is Deters playing to win? âWhat does he do to make sure that what happened in Baltimore doesnât happen here? What will he do differently here?â he asks. But those are the questions, not the message. Johnson explains what he wants to tell the prosecutor of Hamilton County: âLetâs see the cake.â
The demonstration is sponsored by the DuBose family, the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, and the UC student group the Irate8. A handful of demonstrators weave through the crowd wearing signs on their backs with the names of African-Americans who have been killed recently by police across the country: Sandra Bland, Texas. Shereese Francis, New York. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7 years old, Detroit. The plan is to march to the spot in Mt. Auburn where DuBose was shot in the head. The protesters proceed down Vine Street, turning and stopping at the corner of Rice and Valencia. Itâs here where, following the shooting, DuBoseâs car struck a telephone pole and came to a halt. The pole has a deflated balloon tied to it and a T-shirt tacked to it printed with DuBoseâs face. âJah bless my brother,â the shirt reads.
Christina Brown from Black Lives Matter is stirring up the crowd. âThis is what love looks like, right?â she asks.
The group lets out a loud affirmation.
âThis is what justice looks like?â she asks, her voice now really posing a question. The response is negligible. âWe gonna find out in October,â Brown chuckles.
The megaphone is passed to DaShonda Reid, DuBoseâs fiancĂ©e at the time of his death. She describes a phone call she had gotten that very afternoon.
âJoe Deters called and told me his team is working very hard for a conviction,â she says, and there are whoops from the crowd. âHe said he couldnât be here today because he is not in town.â (In fact, it was Piepmeier who called; Deters was in Washington, D.C., at the time.) Nevertheless, he sent his prayers to the family, Reid says, and told her âhis team is pulling out all the stops.â
Before the demonstration ends, I have a moment to speak with Audrey DuBose, Samâs mother. What does she want to see happen at the trial in October? âJustice.â The word hangs in the air as she stares at me. And what would justice mean? âIt means a start on making the world right, making the world peaceful. To make it right we got to have some kind of peace.â
I ask if she has a message for Deters. She thinks, and then says, âThank you. Thank you for beingââand she stops, her eyes filling with tears. âTruthful.â
It was something unexpected and startling to hear: gratitude, first. But then the feeling attached to it, one almost of wonder that the charge of murder had even been brought. Like something miraculous had occurred. Thank you for telling the truth.
Christina Brown of BLM doesnât see this as a miracle. Instead she talks about Detersâs actions as a product of an overwhelming video and Cincinnati history. âItâs just unfortunate that this case was so egregious,â she says. âAn unarmed motorist outside of the campus. Then we find the UC police have a record of disproportionately stopping black peopleâŠit would have been almost an automatic demonstration of injustice had there not been an indictment.â Not that an indictment is equivalent to a conviction, she notes; George Zimmerman was indicted for the murder of Trayvon Martin but wasnât found guilty. (Deters once told radio host Bill Cunningham he would have found it hard to bring charges against Zimmerman.)
âIâm temperate about celebrating something that should have happened,â Brown says. âI refuse to concede the idea that [the indictment] is a superlative thing that should be celebrated. Itâs not. Itâs doing a job.â
Does Black Lives Matter thank Deters?
She scoffs. âNo. Absolutely not.â
He looks more like his mother, Nancy, says his brother Dennis. But it was Donald Deters, their dad, who was the disciplinarian in the house. Dennis thinks Joeâs candor comes from Donald, who was a tough, direct man. There were eight children in the Deters household in Finneytown, fanned out across a 17-year span. That meant Dennis, the baby in the family, shared a room with Daniel and Joeâwho was months away from leaving home for college.
âItâs funny, because one of my earliest memories was sleeping in my crib at the age of 1 or 2, while my brothers were in a bunk bed,â says Dennis. âI can remember them throwing stuffed animals to get me to stop crying, they were so frustrated.â
It was a raucous house, and with so many kids you learned quickly to fend for yourself. âYou knew you were loved and that you had the support system,â says Dennis. âBut letâs just say you learned to eat fast.â
Joe went to St. Xavier High School, and then UC where he stayed on to get his law degree in 1982. Having grown up close to his grandfather, Hamilton County sheriff Daniel Tehan, he had long felt the pull of county politics, and after graduating he jumped in. Deters became an assistant Hamilton County prosecutor, in an office then and now owned by Republicans, and grew active in party circles. By 1988, he was the clerk of courts.
Until then a Queen City homebody his whole life, Deters made the inevitable-seeming move in pursuit of greater glory. While serving as county prosecutor in 1998, he ran for and won election as Ohio State Treasurer, then set his sights on the office of attorney general. It wasnât bluster, just a sensible plan. But it didnât take long for things to go as off-script as they have ever gone in Detersâs life. A stockbroker under investigation by the FBI had raised money, at the direction of Detersâs staff, for the Hamilton County Republican Party (which then wrote checks to Detersâs campaign). After a year-long investigation of his office, fueled by allegations that he gave preferential treatment to businesses that contributed to the party, a former chief of staff and a fund-raiser pled guilty to misdemeanor charges.
Deters angrily testified before a grand jury for three hours. At the end of the investigation, he says he was asked to accept the same plea deal that the two others had accepted. âI said to them, âI ainât pleading to anything. Thereâs no way. And Iâm gonna go down swinging because I know I would never do anything like that.â â
He was never charged with anything, but the investigation, and a stream of leaks he says came from the investigators, made him damaged goods in the state capitol. Not that he misses Columbus. âIt fundamentally changed me as a prosecutor because I saw the abuse of the power of a prosecutorâs office first hand,â he says. âThatâs why I donât like ever leaking nonsense to the press.â
The experience made him less trusting. He marvels, he says, at the power and discretion he has as a prosecutor. He thinks for a second or two. âI could ruin your life tomorrow,â he says. âAnybody. I just release to the media that weâre investigating John Cranley andâŠâ He doesnât even need to finish. âIt really affected me.â He resigned and left Columbus under a cloud in 2004.
But what happened in Columbus stayed in Columbus. Back home Deters was as popular as everâso popular that he jumped in late and still won the race for prosecutor that year as a write-in candidate in the wake of former county prosecutor Mike Allenâs intra-office sex scandal. Since then he has honed his image as a law and order politician who will put more bad guys in prison than anybody else. Heâs sent 14 people to death row, pushed successfully to make the purposeful murder of a child under 13 death penalty eligible, and made it easier to sentence certain juveniles as adults.
The world he describes in public is a roiling, dangerous place that gets more dangerous the further you stray from suburbs into urban areas. I asked if he shared the widespread consensus that racial tensions in Cincinnati have eased since 2001. âI donât think itâs changed much,â he said. âI think that weâre always one incident away from unrest.â
His worldview looms large whenever he gives a press conferenceâthereâs always the chance he will say something that a) is red meat for his base, and b) sounds crazy to others. Or he c) might poke a little fun at a fellow politico. Back in April, exiting City Hall after a meeting to discuss crime fighting strategies with the mayor, CPD Chief Eliot Isaac, City Manager Harry Black, the regional FBI and others, he took one look at the stand of Red bikes on the sidewalk and cracked: âCranley and his goddamned Pee-wee Herman bicycles!â
Case in point: In June, he announced that he would not prosecute a mom whose child had fallen into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, an incident that had ended tragically when the zoo was forced to shoot a gorilla named Harambe. The moment was a gilded gimme, a chance for Deters to look good putting a story of national interest to rest. In a soothing tone, he explained there was no reason to bring charges against the mother. Then he turned dismissive.
âIf anyone doesnât believe a 3-year-old can scamper away very quickly, theyâve never had kids. âCause they can,â he said. He added: âFor instance, had she been in the bathroom smoking crack and let her kids run around the zoo, that would be a different story. But thatâs not what was happening here.â
Wait: for instance? Nobody had said anything about crack. Where did that come from? A logical supposition is that it came from the place his mind goes when it fixes on an African-American mother he does not know who has become a news story, a place filled with stock images of crack smokers and neglectful parents whose kids run in the streets.
McKinley Brown is a former Cincinnati police detective who has worked as a detective in the prosecutorâs office for 18 years. He is also African-American and very loyal to Deters. âIâve been black for 65 years, I know what a racist comment isâŠ,â he starts. âThe quotes? Thatâs just who he is. Heâll say something and we [in the office] will ask, âWhy did he say that?â But heâll say, âWait. What did I say?â Joe just calls it the way he sees it.â
Heâs like the opinionated cousin you see once in a while: heâs fun when heâs talking about boats, you just hope he doesnât start talking about hip-hop. Whether heâs opining about Pee-wee Herman bikes or going off on a problematic rant about black criminals, Deters has the aura of someone who, as the clichĂ© goes, âdoesnât read from a teleprompter,â or âisnât politically correct.â He has used color-coded descriptors like âthugâ in reference to black suspects. In a press conference last year he described a group of African-Americans arrested for beating a white man in Fountain Square as âsoulless and unsalvageable,â people who âwill hurt you. They will hurt your grandma.â If nothing else, he became an equal opportunity offender when he indicted Tensing last summer, calling the incident a âchicken crap stopâ and an âasinine, senseless shooting.â Suddenly the loose talk wasnât about thugs anymore, and social media burned with law enforcement voices venting about the wayward prosecutor.
Like Donald Trump, who he eventually came around to endorsing for president (despite some doubts), Deters is admired by a considerable number of voters for viewing life without a filter. But it will be interesting to see how well his filterless approach operates under the scrutiny of a major trial with racial implications. If we are indeed just one incident away from the edge, how close will Detersâs words take us to the precipice?
Mark Piepmeier has known him for a long time. So long that, at least once in a while, heâll be thinking about his boss on a weekend when heâs not at work. Like, heâll be at his parish festival, St. Michael the Archangel in Sharonville, as he was last June, and on a whim decide to get the boss a present. Like a T-shirt. Which he did. âMister Softee,â it said.
Sitting in his office downtown, with an autographed picture of Don Knotts on the wall, Piepmeier is still chuckling about it a year later. He first met Deters in the early 1980s when he was a young prosecutor and Deters was an intern. Before long they shared an office and hit it off. Piepmeier had gone to Roger Bacon High School, which back then had a rivalry with St. X, and one day Deters asked him, âHow come you Bacon guys hate St. X?â
âBecause you think you are better than us,â Piepmeier responded.
Deters for the win: âWell we are! How do you expect us to feel?â
Itâs funny, Piepmeier says. There was a cheer at Bacon-St. X football games. If Bacon was winning late in the game, the St. X stands would erupt: Thatâs all right, thatâs OK, youâre gonna work for us some day. âWell, sure enough,â laughs Piepmeier, âexcept for a few years with Mike Allen, Iâve worked my whole career for Si Leis and now Joe DetersâSt. X guys!â
Piepmeier grabs a fortune cookie off his desk and holds it up. One night in the middle of a murder case he and Deters were trying, they ordered Chinese. When they got to the fortune cookies, Piepmeier cracked his open. âIt was something stupid like, âMan sleep with dog wakes up with fleasâ or whateverâbut it was funny.â Deters dared him to work it into his closing argument. âWell of course I had to do that,â Piepmeier says.
Ever since, when they work together, they enter into the trial somewhere a fortune from a cookie. They throw it in really quickly, like when interviewing a prospective juror. Deters might say, You wrote on your questionnaire, âWhen in life one faces hardshipsâŠâ What did you mean by that?
Piepmeier looks over in the direction of Barney Fife. âYou just make it up,â he says. âBut in a death penalty case, they are so horrible, sometimes you need a little relief.â
Which gets us back to Mr. Softee, because the T-shirt meant something. âHe knew exactly what it was about,â says Piepmeier. Itâs about a guy who gets stopped on the street by people who spill their guts. They tell him about an injustice being done to them, a sentence that was too harsh, and Deters listens and sends Piepmeier to investigate the story and see what can be done. Lives have been changed, he says, though Deters wonât talk about it.
But maybe thereâs more to Mr. Softee than that. Maybe itâs a reference to a perception among law enforcement that only somebody going soft would ever bring charges against an officer of the law. Deters has faced criticism for both the charges he brought against Ray Tensing and for his words when he announced the indictment.
âI know a lot of police officers and after those remarks it was very hot and heavy,â says Mike Allen, who now works as a criminal defense attorney. âI know Joe likes and supports police officersâŠbut I just donât understand what prompted him to make those statements. It was so unnecessary and so intemperate.â
Allen also is critical of the intensity with which Deters has gone after Tensing. âI donât agree with the indictment for murder,â he says. âMurder is a purposeful act and you have to then assume Tensing intended to kill Mr. DuBose during the traffic stop. I donât buy that. Backed up with a manslaughter charge, which I donât think is warranted, either.
âIt was an overreach,â says Allen. âI think heâs going to have a hard time proving those chargesâŠ. Juries are reluctant to convict police officers and want to give police officers the benefit of the doubt. And I think thatâs appropriate.â
Even inside the prosecutorâs office, there are differences of opinion about the likelihood of a conviction. âI think [Tensing] executed the guy. But you have got to get 12 people to agree. I donât see it happening,â says Brown. âThatâs just my personal opinion. Youâll get a hung jury. All you need is one out of 12.â
Deters says he would have a conversation with Stew Mathews, Tensingâs lawyer, about a plea bargain if Mathews was agreeing to a manslaughter charge. But as of September 1, when this story went to press, Mathews had only offered a misdemeanor plea. âDo you want an apology, too?â Deters mockingly responded.
âThereâs great comfort in doing what you think is right,â he tells me. âAnd if [I] do that, then I donât care what people say, I really donât.â
The possibility of unrest, he says, isnât something he can think about. âI canât deal with that. Itâs not my role. Thatâs for Cranley and those other people,â he says. âI swore to uphold the law and Iâm gonna do it.â
His neck is out there. He will say what he wants to say, the way he wants to say it. None of it as linear as a fortune cookie.
âLook, every profession has bad apples,â he says. âThere are bad reporters, bad prosecutors. The measure of an institution or a community in my mind is not that they exist but in how you deal with it. And weâre dealing with it.â
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