Getting a Parking Ticket in Lorain Shouldn’t Destroy a Life. But Under This City Government, It Did.
By Aaron Christopher Knapp | LorainPoliticsUnplugged.com
Full credit: This article responds to and builds upon the original investigation by Mark Puente of The Marshall Project – Cleveland, with additional analysis and commentary.
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A SYSTEM THAT PUNISHES FIRST AND THINKS LATER
Lorain has spent years building a pattern of governance that repeats itself regardless of who holds office or which department is involved. A small and manageable issue begins to expand because no one takes the time to evaluate whether the actions being taken align with Ohio law, and instead of correction the practices become normalized through habit, assumption, and a local political culture that has never treated statutory compliance as a priority. That is how something as small and unthreatening as parking enforcement mutated into a punitive structure capable of suspending hundreds of residents from driving. The problem was never the ticket itself. The problem was the city creating a criminal pipeline out of something other cities treat as a minor civil inconvenience.
In most places, a parking ticket can be handled online or at a clerk’s counter without fear of long-term consequences. In Lorain, years of misapplied ordinances, nonexistent procedural safeguards, auxiliary volunteers acting far outside the law, and a Municipal Court culture that defaulted to enforcement instead of verification combined to create a process in which residents were criminally summoned, denied proper notice, and ultimately stripped of their driver’s licenses. Many people only discovered the suspension after The Marshall Project Cleveland contacted them. That fact alone reveals the level of institutional failure at every stage of the process.
Nothing inside the system caught the problem. No police supervisor reviewed the legality of allowing auxiliary volunteers to sign criminal summonses. No judge questioned why service was defective. No clerk verified whether certified notices were sent. No council member asked why Lorain stood alone among major Ohio cities in criminalizing parking infractions. These failures were not isolated. They appeared everywhere, all at once, across the entire structure. They demonstrate a system that reacts only when exposed, not when it should.
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LORAIN STANDS ALONE IN CRIMINALIZING PARKING TICKETS
Among Ohio’s major cities, Lorain is completely isolated in its approach to parking enforcement. Cleveland does not suspend driving privileges over a parking ticket. Columbus does not criminalize minor parking violations. Akron, Toledo, Dayton, and Cincinnati treat parking infractions as civil matters. No courtroom appearance is required. No criminal summons is issued. No resident is placed at risk of losing a driver’s license.
Lorain chose a different path. It criminalized every parking violation by designating them as minor misdemeanors. This opened the door to criminal summonses and court involvement. Once that door was opened, the city failed to put a single safeguard in place. The clerk did not send certified mail required by the ordinance. Judges did not confirm whether service had occurred. Auxiliary volunteers wrote and signed summonses they had no authority to issue. And when residents failed to appear for hearings they never knew existed, the court issued license suspensions as if the process had been valid from the start.
Lorain built a structure that functioned with confidence while resting on a completely unlawful foundation. The city generated consequences that no other city in Ohio imposes for the same conduct. Residents paid the price for a system that no one inside the government bothered to check.
WHO IS A PEACE OFFICER IN OHIO?
R.C. 2935.01(B) defines who Ohio law recognizes as a peace officer. Auxiliary volunteers are not included in this definition.
R.C. 109.71 establishes OPOTA standards and the categories of officers subject to state certification.
R.C. 109.77 requires police officers to meet strict training and certification requirements.
Auxiliary volunteers do not meet any of these definitions and are therefore not authorized to exercise police powers.
AUTHORITY TO ARREST OR ISSUE SUMMONSES
R.C. 2935.03 grants arrest authority only to certified peace officers.
Criminal Rule 3 allows criminal complaints only when sworn before someone legally authorized.
Criminal Rule 4 limits the issuance of summonses to judges, magistrates, clerks, prosecutors, or peace officers.
Auxiliary volunteers do not appear anywhere in these authorities and therefore cannot issue or sign criminal summonses.
AUXILIARY VOLUNTEERS ACTING AS POLICE WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY
The issue in Lorain was not a single auxiliary member misunderstanding a rule. The issue was the city creating a role that Ohio law does not permit. Auxiliary volunteers were granted uniforms, radios, assignments, and responsibilities that blurred the line between civilian and sworn officer. They issued summonses. They initiated criminal process. They placed themselves at the front of City Hall directing citizens, regulating access to public meetings, and behaving as if they possessed the statutory authority of trained law enforcement.
But under Ohio law, they had none of it. They had no authority under R.C. 109.77. They were not peace officers under R.C. 2935.01. They could not detain or arrest under R.C. 2935.03. They could not compel identification under R.C. 2921.29. They could not swear complaints under Criminal Rule 3. They could not issue summonses under Criminal Rule 4.
When an auxiliary volunteer signs a summons, the summons is invalid. Jurisdiction never attaches. Every step after that is void. Yet Lorain Municipal Court processed these cases as if everything were legitimate. Judges accepted the signatures. Clerks advanced the cases. Residents were subjected to suspensions and fines that never should have existed.
This was a systemic failure, not a misunderstanding.
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COMPELLING IDENTIFICATION
R.C. 2921.29 requires a person to provide identifying information only if there is a lawful stop, conducted by a peace officer, based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
Auxiliary volunteers are not peace officers.
Therefore, no resident is legally required to provide identification to an auxiliary volunteer under any circumstance.
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WHEN A CITY ALLOWS CIVILIANS TO IMPERSONATE POLICE AUTHORITY, WHATS THE CIVIL LIABILITY?
When a city authorizes, encourages, or simply looks the other way while civilians behave like law enforcement officers, it steps directly into the territory that federal civil rights law was designed to address. Under 42 U.S.C. 1983, a municipality becomes responsible when constitutional violations occur as a result of official policy or from a long-standing practice so routine that it functions as policy whether anyone admits it or not. Lorain’s use of its auxiliary volunteers fits that definition precisely. The city did not merely allow volunteers to help with parades or special events. It placed them into positions that Ohio law reserves for trained, certified peace officers. It allowed them to initiate criminal processes. It allowed them to interact with citizens in ways that carried legal consequences. The city relied on their signatures, their observations, and their assumed authority, even though the law never granted them any.
When an auxiliary volunteer signs a criminal summons, the resident who receives it is immediately subjected to a legal obligation that never should have existed. A summons is not a suggestion. It is a command backed by the power of the state. If the person issuing it has no legal authority, then the recipient is being compelled into the criminal justice system without lawful cause. Courts have repeatedly held that this type of intrusion satisfies the threshold for unlawful seizure. It also implicates due process violations, because the resident is being forced to defend against a proceeding that was invalid from the moment it began.
The exposure does not stop there. Auxiliary volunteers in Lorain were also posted at City Hall, where they questioned citizens, asked for identification, attempted to regulate access, and behaved as though they possessed legal authority to control who entered public meetings. The First Amendment protects the right of citizens to observe and participate in government without interference or intimidation. The Ohio Open Meetings Act guarantees the right to attend without being screened or required to identify oneself. When civilians acting under the color of municipal authority interfere with those rights, the city becomes responsible for the constitutional harm.
Residents who were denied access, delayed, questioned, or intimidated have a reasonable basis to argue that their First Amendment rights were impeded. Residents who were summoned, fined, suspended, or processed based on invalid summonses have potential claims for unlawful seizure, denial of due process, and improper initiation of criminal proceedings. These are not minor technicalities. These are violations that federal courts take seriously, particularly when they result from established city practices.
Lorain’s auxiliary program has continued for years. It has not stopped issuing tickets because internal safeguards kicked in. It did not stop because the city reviewed its practices and recognized the statutory inconsistencies. It continued until outside scrutiny forced city officials to acknowledge what should have been obvious from the beginning. The liability that Lorain faces does not arise from one employee or one moment of confusion. It arises from a system that normalized unlawful practices, institutionalized them, and allowed them to affect hundreds of residents without ever asking whether the law permitted any of it.
The broader concern is not whether the city intended to cause harm. Intent is not required under 42 U.S.C. 1983. What matters is whether the municipality’s policies or tolerated customs led to constitutional violations. Lorain’s long-standing tolerance of auxiliary volunteers acting as police, initiating criminal processes, and regulating public access to government buildings shows a disregard for the legal boundaries that protect citizens from exactly this type of overreach. The exposure is real. The liability is real. And the residents who were pushed into an unlawful system will have every legal right to hold the city accountable for the harm it caused.
A JUDGE WITH A PATTERN
WHY THIS SCANDAL FITS BROADER CONCERNS ABOUT JUDGE MARK MIHOK
The parking disaster becomes fully understandable once it is placed alongside Judge Mark Mihok’s long record. This was not an isolated breakdown. It was an extension of years of judicial practices that routinely pushed the limits of Ohio law and sometimes ignored statutory requirements altogether. For more than a decade, concerns have been raised about Mihok’s handling of contempt, due process, and the manner in which his court treated enforcement as a revenue-generating tool rather than a judicial function grounded in legal restraint.
One of the clearest patterns is his misuse of contempt authority. Contempt law in Ohio is not complicated. Direct contempt involves behavior occurring in front of the judge. Indirect contempt requires formal procedures, written findings, and specific due process protections. A failure to appear is not contempt. It does not qualify, and the statute does not permit contempt sanctions for failing to attend a hearing unless specific criteria are met. Yet more than fifty cases have been identified where Mihok imposed contempt penalties for failures to appear and did so without following the procedures the law requires.
Court records show journal entries lacking the findings required by statute. They show penalties imposed where due process was incomplete or absent. They show a streamlined judicial style that favored efficiency and financial consequences over the careful application of legal standards. This was not a few errors. This was an institutional habit.
These issues align with another documented concern: the financial framing of traffic and parking enforcement.
Judge Mihok openly acknowledged that these cases acted as revenue sources for the city.
“Traffic and parking tickets are a moneymaker, so we enforce tickets.”
Judge Mihok
When a court begins thinking in financial terms, the protective legal framework that governs its authority becomes secondary. Enforcement takes priority. The financial expectations placed upon the court begin to shape outcomes.
“We were all worried that if we can’t do anything, collections are gonna go way down, which they, in fact, are.”
Judge Mihok
Viewed through this lens, the parking scandal was not an accident. It was a predictable outcome of a judicial environment where shortcuts had been normalized and procedural safeguards routinely overlooked. When Mihok claimed he did not know certified mail was required or that auxiliary volunteers lacked authority, those explanations are difficult to reconcile with years of decisions in which the law was treated as flexible.
A court that repeatedly misapplies contempt is not a court that will detect defective service in a parking case. A court that allows unofficial personnel to function as police is not a court that will question the legitimacy of a summons signed by an auxiliary volunteer. A court that thinks about revenue will not pause long enough to verify whether jurisdiction properly attached before suspending someone’s driver’s license.
The deeper concern is the response once the scandal became public. Rather than owning the issue, the initial posture was defensive and minimizing. It was framed as a misunderstanding, not a systemic failure. Lost in the rhetoric were the hundreds of Lorain residents who were hauled into a criminal process without lawful notice or valid summonses.
This scandal fits perfectly into a larger pattern. It reveals a judicial system that has drifted for years and no longer recognizes its own deviations from the law. It exposes a court that stopped questioning its own practices long ago. And it demonstrates how a single unlawful practice can grow unchecked when the legal culture surrounding it has already normalized operating outside statutory boundaries.
“Our conclusion was the state didn’t amend that section and that we can still do it.”
JUDGE MIHOK
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MISUSE OF AUTHORITY IN CITY HALL SECURITY
Lorain’s misuse of its auxiliary volunteers did not stop at parking enforcement. It extended directly into the one place where constitutional protections should be the strongest. City Hall. The front door of government. The location where the public has the absolute right to enter, observe, and participate in meetings that affect their lives. Instead of ensuring open and barrier free access, Lorain placed its auxiliary volunteers at the entrance and allowed them to behave as if they possessed the legal authority to screen, question, restrict, and control the public’s access to their own government. This created a scenario where residents were confronted by individuals who looked official, who acted official, and who spoke with the tone of officials, but who possessed none of the authority the law requires.
Under the Ohio Open Meetings Act, citizens have the right to attend public meetings without identifying themselves to anyone. A resident does not need to show identification at the door. A resident does not need to justify why they are present, where they live, who they support politically, or what they intend to speak about. Public meetings belong to the public. The law is clear and uncompromising about that. When a city uses civilian volunteers in uniforms and positions them as gatekeepers, it creates the appearance that these volunteers are exercising legal control over the public. That alone is a problem. The bigger problem is that Lorain actually allowed them to do it.
There were repeated instances of auxiliary volunteers questioning residents as they approached the entrance. They asked people to state their names and reasons for attendance. They attempted to control the flow of entry. They intimidated citizens who were simply trying to attend a public meeting. These volunteers were not trained in constitutional law. They were not certified officers with authority to conduct searches, restrict movement, or compel compliance. They were civilian volunteers placed in a role that created confusion, pressure, and in some cases outright denial of access.
This is more than a public relations issue. It is a legal one. The First Amendment protects the right of citizens to observe their government without interference. It protects the right to record public officials in public spaces. It protects access to the building where the business of government is conducted. When a city uses civilians to regulate access, and those civilians impede that access, the city opens itself to significant constitutional exposure. Courts do not tolerate interference with public meeting access, especially when the interference is carried out by individuals who have no lawful authority to conduct such screenings.
The risk does not end at the doorway. When auxiliary volunteers are placed in a position that allows them to question citizens, they create an environment where the line between suggestion and compulsion becomes blurred. A resident confronted by a uniformed volunteer may reasonably believe they have to comply. They may feel pressured to disclose information they do not have to disclose. They may feel threatened or monitored in ways that chill their willingness to participate. These are classic First Amendment violations, and they arise the moment a government actor, or someone placed in a government actor’s role, restricts or conditions access to public meetings.
Lorain did not simply misuse volunteers. It created an environment where individuals with no legal authority controlled access to the public’s own government building. It gave volunteers the power to influence who felt comfortable attending. It allowed them to interact with citizens in a way that created the appearance of law enforcement authority. And it sanctioned these practices by allowing them to continue unchecked.
The problem is not only what happened in the moment. The problem is what the system allowed and normalized. No one in leadership intervened to correct the practice. No one asked whether volunteers had any legal authority to screen residents. No one questioned whether the city was violating public meeting law. The practice continued because no one at City Hall treats constitutional protections as part of their responsibility. It reveals a culture in which authority is exercised without understanding and where the legal limits that protect citizens are treated as optional instead of mandatory.
Lorain’s misuse of auxiliary volunteers at City Hall was not just a mistake. It was a direct violation of both state law and constitutional rights. And the city’s tolerance of this practice, for years, exposes it to significant legal consequences that will not disappear simply because the system now claims it did not know any better.
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LORAIN IS A GOVERNMENT THAT DOES NOT COURSE CORRECT
The central story is not the parking tickets or the auxiliary volunteers. It is the internal culture that permitted these actions to continue unquestioned. There was no internal review. No supervisor intervened. No judge stopped a case. No clerk processed certified mail. No council member asked why Lorain alone criminalized parking. Every layer of government failed, not because the law was ambiguous, but because no one inside the system ever sought to verify compliance.
Lorain operates on habit instead of legal grounding. Policies are created without understanding, enforced without authority, and defended until public pressure forces change. The city identifies problems only when journalists expose them. This pattern is now so ingrained that each new scandal follows the same shape. A program begins. It expands. It drifts from the law. Residents are harmed. And the city only responds once someone forces transparency.
Until this pattern changes, Lorain will continue to manufacture new crises.
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DAMAGES AND REMEDIES FOR RESIDENTS HARMED BY LORAIN’S UNLAWFUL PRACTICES
When a city allows unlawful enforcement practices to continue for years, the result is not a theoretical harm. Real people suffer real damages. These damages are not limited to the fines listed on a citation or the cost of a reinstatement fee. They spread outward into employment, transportation, reputation, stability, time, and emotional distress. Lorain’s decision to rely on auxiliary volunteers for duties reserved for law enforcement, combined with the Municipal Court’s willingness to process invalid summonses, created a chain reaction of injuries that courts recognize as compensable under both federal and state law.
At the most basic level, any resident who received a criminal summons signed by someone without legal authority was subjected to a violation of their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure. Being compelled to appear in court based on an invalid summons is a recognized seizure in the eyes of the law. It forces a person into a legal process they should never have been in. It can result in missed work, lost wages, childcare costs, transportation expenses, and the anxiety, shame, or fear that comes from being treated as a criminal. These injuries are real, and the law allows compensation for them.
Residents who lost their driver’s licenses due to suspended privileges suffered even greater harm. A license suspension is more than an administrative mark on a record. It limits a person’s ability to work, travel, take children to school, care for family, seek medical treatment, or maintain independence. It exposes them to additional criminal penalties if they drive out of necessity. It can lead to job loss or disciplinary action at work. When the suspension was triggered by an invalid legal process, the entire cascade of consequences becomes compensable. Courts have consistently awarded damages for lost employment, lost income, increased financial burden, and the emotional and psychological distress that flows from being unable to legally drive.
The unlawful actions also implicate the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. When a resident is not provided proper notice, cannot defend against a charge, or is penalized through a process that never had legal jurisdiction, they are denied procedural fairness. Due process violations open the door to compensatory damages, attorney fees, and in some cases punitive damages if the conduct was particularly reckless or indifferent. Lorain’s long-term tolerance of these practices, especially after concerns were raised by residents and ignored, places the city closer to the threshold where punitive damages become a realistic possibility.
There is also the First Amendment component. Residents who were questioned, delayed, or discouraged from entering City Hall for public meetings may argue that their right to participate in government was chilled. Even subtle or implied interference can establish a First Amendment violation if it would cause a reasonable person to hesitate before exercising their rights. Damages for First Amendment violations can include compensation for the harm itself, injunctive relief requiring policy changes, and in some cases punitive damages against the municipality if the conduct was flagrant.
Beyond constitutional claims, state tort claims may apply. False arrest. Abuse of process. Negligence. Negligent supervision. Negligent training. Malicious prosecution if the court imposed penalties after being made aware of the defective process. Each of these theories exposes the city to additional financial liability. Every resident touched by the unlawful system may have a different mix of federal and state claims, which increases the complexity and potential cost of resolving the fallout.
Remedies may also include equitable relief. Courts can order practices to end. They can prohibit the city from using auxiliary volunteers in any law enforcement capacity. They can require training for clerks and judicial officers. They can mandate record corrections, purging of invalid convictions, reimbursement of fines and fees, reinstatement costs, and the clearing of driving records. They can even require audits or reporting requirements for the city to ensure future compliance.
There is a final category of harm that deserves attention. Reputational damage. Many residents subjected to the unlawful process were treated as criminals in a community where reputation still matters. They were embarrassed in public courtrooms. They were reported to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. They were labeled non compliant or irresponsible in ways that carry social costs. Damages for reputational harm are recognized under both federal civil rights law and state tort law, and Lorain’s practices created reputational injuries for hundreds of people who did nothing wrong.
In every direction, the city’s exposure grows. These were not isolated events. They were not the result of one volunteer stepping over a line. They were the predictable outcome of a system that operated outside the law for years without review. Every resident affected by these policies has a pathway to legal remedies, and the city has no credible excuse for allowing these harms to continue. Lorain did not accidentally create this exposure. It built it one unlawful practice at a time.
Large cities across Ohio use auxiliary personnel for limited support. Cleveland assigns them to parades and traffic direction. Columbus uses them for community outreach and special events. Akron, Toledo, Dayton, and Cincinnati restrict them to ceremonial assistance and festival support. None allow auxiliary volunteers to issue summonses, initiate criminal proceedings, or regulate public access to government buildings. Lorain’s approach was an outlier and entirely inconsistent with state law.
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FINAL WORD
The most remarkable part of this entire scandal is not the defective summonses, or the hundreds of suspended licenses, or the city’s decision to criminalize parking when no other major city in Ohio saw any reason to do so. The most remarkable part is the straight-faced insistence from inside the system that no one knew any of this was wrong. The judge did not know certified mail was required. The judge did not know auxiliary volunteers had no authority. The judge did not know summonses had to be served properly. The judge did not know that jurisdiction does not magically appear out of thin air. The judge did not know that contempt has rules. The judge did not know that financial pressure is not a legal standard. If this were not real life, it would read like satire.
The public is expected to believe that a man who has presided over thousands of criminal cases somehow never learned the most basic principles that govern criminal procedure. We are expected to believe that someone who has issued contempt findings again and again did not understand the statutes governing contempt. We are expected to believe a municipal judge did not understand how service works, what creates jurisdiction, or which officers are legally allowed to issue summonses. We are expected to accept that a judge who has imposed fines, suspensions, and sanctions for years is somehow a stranger to the law he enforces. And we are expected to take that explanation seriously.
If Lorain residents ever wondered what judicial gaslighting looks like, this is it. Residents were criminalized for parking too far from a curb. Residents were summoned into court without lawful notice. Residents were suspended based on signatures from volunteers who could not legally direct traffic at a festival, let alone initiate a criminal case. Residents were hauled through a process that never should have existed. But when the truth finally surfaced, the explanation was a shrug and a claim of ignorance.
It becomes hard to swallow the idea that the court did not understand the rules when every one of those rules was broken in the exact way that benefited the court financially. It becomes difficult to believe that sworn officers, magistrates, clerks, and a long-serving judge all missed the same basic requirements year after year. It becomes impossible to accept that the law was just confusing. The law was not confusing. The law was ignored.
The most powerful part of this entire story is the simplicity of what the law actually requires. A summons must be issued by someone authorized. Service must be performed properly. Jurisdiction must attach. Contempt must follow statutory steps. Auxiliary volunteers cannot do the job of police. None of this is obscure. None of this is buried in some obscure federal regulation that no one reads. These are foundational elements of criminal procedure. They are the things law students grasp before their first internships. They are the principles every judge must master long before they sit on a bench.
For a judge to claim he did not know these laws is an indictment of the court, not an excuse. And for the city to act surprised is an indictment of the entire system.
This is why parking tickets are not the real story. They are only the most recent symptom. The deeper problem is a government that treats legality the same way it treats transparency, which is to say it acknowledges it only under duress. Lorain has become a place where compliance is something forced upon the system from the outside. Laws are checked only when scandal erupts. Rights are recognized only when litigation threatens. Accountability arrives only when journalists pry the lid open. This parking scandal did not break the system. It revealed the system.
Residents deserve better. They deserve a city that knows the law before enforcing it. They deserve a municipal court that understands its own authority and its own limits. They deserve a judiciary that sees power as a responsibility, not a revenue source. They deserve a government that can identify its own failures without needing national reporters to explain them.
Until this culture changes, Lorain will continue creating scandals that could have been prevented with a fifteen minute reading of the Ohio Revised Code. There is nothing complicated about the rules that were violated here. They were ignored because no one in authority believed they mattered. And when those responsible tell the public that they did not understand the law, the safest conclusion is that they did not bother to look.
Lorain keeps repeating the same failures because the mindset never changes. The people who enforce the rules do not read them. The people who interpret the rules do not follow them. The people who write the rules do not review them. The people harmed by all of this are the residents who trusted the system to function.
The parking scandal is not the end of anything. It is the warning siren of a government that has grown too comfortable with not knowing, not checking, and not caring until someone else makes them care. And if the system refuses to learn, then the public has no reason to trust it.
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About The Author
Every Ordinance passed by City Council must follow the Constitutional Standards and not exceed the Revised Code.
Lorain violates the Constitution of Ohio and the federal constitution. It doesn’t follow the Revised Code as required. The Law Director’s office is not doing its job as expected.