Visiting Judge Burnside Slammed the Door on Cillo’s Head Start Do Over, Exactly Like We Said She Would

When Accountability Turns Into Obsession

By Aaron Knapp

Investigative Journalist and Public Records Litigator
Publisher, Lorain Politics Unplugged

There are moments in local government when the outcome is so predictable that the only real mystery is why officials kept pushing long after the law, the timeline, and basic common sense made the destination obvious. Visiting Judge Janet Burnside’s January 2026 ruling in the Lorain “Head Start” case is one of those moments. Prosecutor Tony Cillo tried to unwind what the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas did in 2021 and 2022, which is the set of judgments that led to Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen being freed and then fully exonerated. Burnside denied the request, and her reasoning, as reported, reads like a checklist of every reason this effort was never going to land.

I have written about this before. The short version, stripped of political theater, is that Cillo attempted to re-litigate something the State itself pursued and obtained when the office was run by J.D. Tomlinson. Burnside’s response, again as reported, was blunt. The prior judgments were not void. They were not obtained by fraud. The motion was untimely. And even if you tried to pretend none of that mattered, double jeopardy and finality are not optional in the American system.

If you are wondering why I am framing this as a waste of public resources, it is because the legal system is not built to accommodate a prosecutor’s bruised ego, political grudges, or institutional denial. Courts exist to decide cases, and when a case is over in a way the Constitution recognizes as over, the prosecutor does not get to demand a do over because the office changed hands. What happened here was not legal advocacy in service of justice. It was an expensive, deliberate refusal to accept finality.

This was not a close call. This was not unsettled law. This was not some gray procedural question that required creative lawyering to resolve. The barriers were obvious on day one. Timeliness was a problem. Final judgments were a problem. Double jeopardy was a brick wall. And yet the motion was filed anyway, hundreds of pages long, requiring court time, staff time, judicial assignment, and public expense, all in service of an outcome that any competent observer knew was unattainable.

That is not zeal. That is waste.

And waste in this context is not abstract. Every hour spent re-litigating a dead case is an hour not spent on current prosecutions, victim services, or actual public safety work. Every filing chasing a legally impossible outcome is taxpayer money burned to preserve a narrative, not to protect the public. Burnside did not just deny the motion. She effectively confirmed that this entire exercise should never have been brought in the first place.

Now layer in the retaliation component, because pretending this was neutral or apolitical insults the reader’s intelligence.

Tony Cillo did not just go after a judgment. He went after the people who produced it. He accused his predecessor, J.D. Tomlinson, and Tomlinson’s chief of staff, former Judge James Burge, of a “wide ranging fraud.” Not error. Not disagreement. Fraud. Criminal language. Career ending language. And he did it in a case where Tomlinson had already been targeted, investigated, charged, and politically destroyed once before, only for those efforts to collapse under scrutiny.

That matters.

Because when a newly elected prosecutor uses the power of his office to revive accusations against a former prosecutor who overturned a wrongful conviction, after the courts have already spoken, after the charges were dismissed, after the judgments became final, that stops looking like accountability and starts looking like punishment. It sends a message, intentionally or not, that correcting past prosecutorial misconduct comes with a price, and that price may be paid long after you leave office.

Burnside’s ruling cuts straight through that tactic. By rejecting the fraud framing and calling it empty in light of the record, she did more than deny relief. She stripped the accusation of legitimacy. She made clear that disagreement with how justice was done is not fraud on the court, and that rebranding old political grievances as legal emergencies does not obligate the judiciary to play along.

And then there is the double jeopardy problem, which is where this effort fully crosses from aggressive to absurd.

Once charges are dismissed in the posture they were dismissed here, prosecution ends. That is not a suggestion. That is a constitutional command. Burnside made that explicit. There is no legal authority to re institute the indictment. None. You cannot keep trying people until the politics feel better. You cannot rewind the clock because a new administration wants a different ending.

That is why this was never going to happen.

And that is why this looks so bad.

Not because Cillo lost. Prosecutors lose motions all the time. This looks bad because he chose a fight that advertised his priorities, his judgment, and his willingness to spend public money pursuing a legally impossible outcome in order to relitigate the legacy of a predecessor he could not defeat any other way.

The court shut the door. The law shut the door. The Constitution shut the door.

And the only thing left standing is the bill.

What Burnside Actually Shut Down, According to the Record That Has Been Reported

The Chronicle-Telegram’s reporting lays out Judge Burnside’s reasoning in language that is both accessible and devastating. She rejected outright the claim that the 2021 and 2022 judgments were void or the product of fraud, and she wrote that Prosecutor Cillo’s motion was “untimely because it is made over three years after the judgments were entered,” adding, “For that reason alone, the motion must be denied.” That is not a throwaway line and it is not judicial small talk. It is the court announcing that the most basic procedural gate was closed before anyone even reached the merits, and that the prosecutor either ignored that reality or chose to gamble public resources pretending it did not apply.

That line matters because it goes to the heart of how courts function. Timeliness is not a technicality. It is a core component of due process. Due process is not only about giving parties an opportunity to be heard. It is also about giving them finality, stability, and the ability to rely on judgments once the window for challenge has closed. The State had its opportunity to appeal or contest what happened in 2021 and 2022 when those orders were entered. According to the reporting, it did not. The law does not reward strategic silence followed by a later change of heart when political leadership changes. Three years later, a court is not going to suspend the concept of time simply because a new prosecutor wants to reopen a case that has already been litigated, dismissed, and closed in the posture the Constitution recognizes as final.

The reporting also quotes Burnside addressing the inflammatory “fraud” language that anchored Cillo’s filing, and this is where the effort crosses from weak to reckless. Burnside described the proceedings that led to Smith and Allen’s exonerations as transparent and participatory, and she wrote that characterizing them as fraud was an “empty, insulting label” in light of the extensive record built in those proceedings. That sentence does real work. It does not merely reject an argument. It repudiates the premise that the court was misled, manipulated, or deceived. It affirms that the process unfolded in the open, with notice, hearings, and opportunities for participation by all parties, including those who opposed the outcome.

This is not just a loss on the merits. It is a public judicial rebuke that carries institutional weight.

When a visiting judge uses language like empty and insulting to describe a prosecutor’s framing, the message is unmistakable. The motion did not simply fail because it fell short. It failed because it should never have been brought in the first place. Any competent lawyer reviewing the procedural posture would have seen the barriers immediately. Timeliness. Finality. Constitutional protections. Those were not hidden traps. They were bright red warning signs. Burnside’s ruling, as reported, makes clear that ignoring those signs was not advocacy. It was an abuse of the court’s time and the public’s money, and the court was not willing to indulge it.

The “Fraud” Narrative Was Always the Weakest Part of the Play

Cillo’s filing alleged a “wide-ranging fraud” by his predecessor, J.D. Tomlinson, and by Tomlinson’s chief of staff, former Judge James Burge, and that choice alone exposed how unserious this effort was from the start. Fraud is not a neutral word. It is not descriptive. It is accusatory. It is career destroying language that implies secret deals, deception of the court, and intentional corruption of the judicial process. It is also the fastest way to get headlines, because nothing travels faster in local media than a prosecutor accusing another prosecutor and a former judge of criminal level misconduct. That was not an accident. This framing was designed to shock, to inflame, and to recast a closed constitutional question as a morality play about villains and heroes.

The problem for Cillo is that courts do not operate on vibes, grudges, or political storytelling. Courts do not vacate years old final judgments because a newly elected prosecutor decides that the previous administration were bad people who made him uncomfortable. Courts require proof, and not just proof of disagreement or distaste, but proof of intentional deception that subverted the judicial process itself. “I do not like how the last prosecutor handled this” is not a legal standard. “I would not have done it that way” is not fraud. And dressing those sentiments up in criminal language does not transform them into evidence.

Tomlinson publicly denied wrongdoing and described the accusation for what it was, an outrageous lie, and News 5’s reporting captured that clash in real time. The former prosecutor did not hedge. He did not apologize. He did not retreat into silence. He stated plainly that the decisions were made openly, in court, with notice, hearings, and judicial approval, and that the attempt to recast those actions as fraud was detached from reality. That matters, because if there had been even a hint of secret maneuvering or deception, the record would have reflected it. Instead, the record reflected exactly the opposite.

What ultimately convinced me was not spin or loyalty. It was how Tomlinson responded when accused. He did not hedge, he did not issue a carefully lawyered non denial, and he did not disappear behind a spokesperson. He publicly denied wrongdoing and described the accusation for what it was, an outrageous lie, and News 5’s reporting captured that clash in real time. That matters, because people who have something to hide almost always speak in fog and conditionals. Tomlinson did the opposite. He stated plainly that the decisions were made openly, in court, with notice to all parties, hearings on the record, and judicial approval at every step, and that the effort to rebrand those actions as fraud was detached from reality.
That kind of response only works if the record can withstand scrutiny, because it invites scrutiny rather than avoiding it. If there had been even a hint of secret maneuvering, side deals, or deception, the paper trail would have surfaced it by now. This case has been litigated, relitigated, audited by new prosecutors, argued in the press, and weaponized politically for years. Instead of uncovering hidden misconduct, every pass through the record has reinforced the same thing, which is that the exonerations happened in the open, under judicial supervision, and in a way the law recognizes as legitimate. When a former prosecutor stands in front of that kind of scrutiny and says, without qualification, that the accusation is false, and the court later describes the fraud narrative as empty and insulting, it becomes very hard to pretend this was ever about uncovering truth rather than manufacturing doubt.That is what won me over, not loyalty, not ideology, but the alignment between how the accused described the process and how the court ultimately described it as well.

Aaron C Knapp

That is why Burnside’s response matters so much. When the judge described the “fraud” label as empty and insulting in light of the record built in those extensive proceedings, she did more than reject an argument. She exposed the filing for what it was, a rhetorical stunt masquerading as a legal theory. At that moment, the entire narrative collapsed under its own weight. The sensational accusation that was supposed to justify reopening a closed case instead became the reason the court publicly slapped it down.

This is where Cillo crossed from aggressive into embarrassing. By choosing fraud as his hook, he raised the bar to a level he could not come close to meeting. He invited the court to scrutinize the record for deception, and the court responded by affirming transparency. He accused others of corrupting the judicial process, and the judge responded by making clear that the process functioned exactly as it was supposed to. That is not just losing an argument. That is being exposed as unserious.

In practical terms, this is why the motion read like a joke to anyone who understands how courts actually work. Fraud is not proven by insinuation. It is not proven by outrage. It is not proven by repeating the word loudly enough that people forget what it actually requires. When a judge tells you that your central accusation is empty and insulting, what she is really saying is that you wasted the court’s time and insulted the intelligence of everyone involved.

And once that fraud narrative collapsed, there was nothing left. No legal mechanism. No procedural foothold. No constitutional opening. Just a failed attempt to relitigate the legacy of a predecessor by throwing incendiary language at a wall and hoping something stuck. It did not. The court made sure of that.

When Prosecutors Are Also Lawyers, the Ethical Rules Do Not Disappear

There is a part of this story that has been largely ignored, and it is the part that should trouble anyone who cares about the integrity of the legal profession itself. Tony Cillo and J.D. Tomlinson are not just political actors. They are not just elected officials. They are lawyers. They are members of the Ohio bar, bound by the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct, and those rules do not switch off simply because someone is wearing a prosecutor’s badge or engaging in political combat.

That matters, because accusing a fellow lawyer of a “wide-ranging fraud” on the court is not casual rhetoric. It is not campaign speech. It is an allegation of intentional dishonesty directed at the judiciary. Under the ethical rules governing lawyers in Ohio, fraud on the court is among the most serious accusations that can be made, because it strikes at the core of the justice system itself. Lawyers are officers of the court. Prosecutors, in particular, carry heightened responsibilities not just to win arguments, but to protect the integrity of the process.

Ohio’s Rules of Professional Conduct impose duties of candor, fairness, and restraint. They also impose duties toward other lawyers. A lawyer is not free to level accusations of criminal or fraudulent conduct against another lawyer without a good-faith factual basis that goes beyond speculation, inference, or political disagreement. The rules exist precisely because the legal system cannot function if lawyers weaponize accusations of fraud as a substitute for proof or as a means of relitigating disputes they have already lost.

This is where Cillo’s conduct invites scrutiny, even if no formal complaint is ever filed. He did not merely argue that the prior administration made legal errors. He did not argue that he would have exercised prosecutorial discretion differently. He accused his predecessor and a former judge of orchestrating a “wide-ranging fraud” on the court. That language was chosen deliberately. It carries disciplinary implications. It signals to the public that fellow members of the bar engaged in intentional dishonesty, not just poor judgment.

When Judge Burnside then characterizes that fraud label as empty and insulting in light of the record, the ethical problem sharpens. At that point, the accusation is no longer just unproven. It has been affirmatively rejected by a court that reviewed the record and found transparency rather than deception. Continuing to advance or defend such allegations after that kind of judicial rebuke raises serious questions about whether the accusation was ever grounded in evidence, or whether it was a tactical and political choice dressed up as legal argument.

Lawyers are taught early in their careers that accusations of fraud are different from ordinary advocacy. Fraud is not something you imply lightly. It is not something you allege to gain leverage or attention. It is something you allege only when the facts compel it, because once spoken, it damages reputations, careers, and public trust. That is especially true when the target is another lawyer who acted in an open courtroom, under judicial supervision, with notice to all parties.

Prosecutors, more than anyone else, are supposed to understand this distinction. Their ethical duty is not merely to argue aggressively, but to seek justice. That duty includes restraint. It includes respect for final judgments. It includes avoiding conduct that undermines confidence in the legal system by suggesting that courts were duped or corrupted without evidence to support that claim.

This is why the ethical dimension of Cillo’s conduct cannot be brushed aside as politics as usual. When a prosecutor accuses a former prosecutor of fraud, knowing that accusation will reverberate far beyond the courtroom, he is not acting solely as a politician. He is acting as a lawyer, subject to the same professional standards as everyone else admitted to the bar. Those standards exist to prevent exactly this kind of escalation, where legal disagreements metastasize into accusations of criminality without proof.

None of this requires a finding that a specific rule was violated. That is not the point. The point is that the rules exist to guide behavior, not just to punish misconduct after the fact. And viewed through that lens, this episode looks less like principled advocacy and more like an ethical failure of judgment. A failure to distinguish between lawful disagreement and defamatory accusation. A failure to appreciate that the authority of a prosecutor’s office magnifies the harm of reckless allegations. And a failure to remember that the legal profession is supposed to police itself precisely so courts do not become arenas for personal or political vendettas.

In the end, Judge Burnside did more than deny a motion. She implicitly restored a boundary that should never have been crossed. She reminded everyone that transparency is not fraud, that losing a case does not entitle a lawyer to accuse others of corruption, and that the courtroom is not a stage for professional retaliation. For lawyers who still take their ethical obligations seriously, that reminder should land just as hard as the ruling itself.

This Is What “Bad Optics” Looks Like When a Court Writes It Down

People like to dismiss the phrase “bad optics” as if it were nothing more than a communications problem, something that can be solved with a press release, a careful talking point, or a promise to “review options.” That framing is far too gentle for what happened here. This is not a public relations problem. This is a credibility problem, and credibility is not something a prosecutor’s office can afford to squander lightly, because once it is gone, every decision that follows is viewed through a lens of suspicion.

Start with the obvious. An attempt to unwind exonerations in a case as notorious as the Lorain Head Start prosecutions does not read as principled to most people watching. It does not read as a neutral effort to correct an error. It reads as institutional self protection. Nancy Smith’s civil lawsuit for wrongful conviction is pending, and anyone paying even minimal attention can see the downstream incentives that exist when wrongful conviction litigation is looming. The timing matters. The posture matters. The context matters. The Associated Press’s 2022 reporting made clear that the charges were dismissed and that the prosecutor at the time explicitly stated the case was not coming back. That public record is part of why later efforts to resurrect the matter look less like law enforcement and more like gamesmanship designed to blunt accountability.

Then there is the judge’s language itself, which is where “bad optics” becomes something far more serious. Burnside’s quoted description of the fraud framing as empty and insulting does not just resolve a legal question. It gives the public permission to treat the entire motion as unserious. Judges choose their words carefully, especially visiting judges who have no political stake in local power struggles. When one of them uses language like that, it signals that the court viewed the filing not as a close call that narrowly failed, but as something fundamentally disconnected from the record. At that point, you do not recover by saying you will meet with staff or explore an appeal. You recover, if at all, by explaining why taxpayers should believe your office exercises sound judgment and restraint, and why this filing should not be seen as emblematic of how you intend to wield prosecutorial power going forward.

The damage deepens when you look at how Cillo chose to position himself. He did not frame this as a modest procedural disagreement. He framed himself as the adult in the room, accusing his predecessor and a former judge of corrupting the court through fraud. That is a posture of moral authority. It is a claim to higher ground. And the visiting judge’s response, in substance, was to say that this was not corruption at all, that the process was transparent, participatory, and conducted through established mechanisms, and that the motion was late on top of everything else. When a court responds that way, the authority the prosecutor tried to claim collapses in on itself.

That is why, in my opinion, this episode makes Cillo look like a laughing stock. Not because mockery is the goal, and not because losing a motion is inherently shameful. Prosecutors lose motions every day. This looks ridiculous because he took an extraordinary swing in a case where the basic legal barriers were visible from the cheap seats, and he did it in a way that practically invited the court to swat him down in public. He chose the most inflammatory framing available, accused fellow lawyers of fraud, and forced a visiting judge to explain why the accusation did not even come close to matching the record. The result reads less like a principled defeat and more like professional embarrassment committed to paper.

That is my opinion. Readers are free to disagree. But the quotes are the quotes, and they belong to the court, not to me.

Third Time Is Not a Charm, It Is a Pattern

There is one more part of this story that cannot be ignored, because it turns this from a single bad decision into a recognizable pattern. This was not the first time J.D. Tomlinson has been targeted after correcting the Head Start case. It was not the second time either. Each attempt has worn a different costume, but the underlying impulse has remained the same. Undo the exoneration. Discredit the prosecutor who allowed it. Reframe transparency as wrongdoing. Keep the door cracked open just enough that finality never quite feels final.

That context matters, because when something fails once, it can be chalked up to error. When it fails twice, it may be stubbornness. When it fails a third time, after courts have spoken clearly and repeatedly, it stops looking like persistence and starts looking like refusal. Refusal to accept the law as it exists. Refusal to accept that the case is over. Refusal to accept that some convictions were wrong and that the system bears responsibility for that fact.

Courts are patient institutions, but they are not infinite. Burnside’s ruling reads the way it does precisely because the court was not addressing a fresh question. It was addressing a recycled one. The language about timeliness, finality, transparency, and double jeopardy is not novel. It is the law repeating itself because someone insisted on pretending it had changed.

At some point, continuing to press the same theory is no longer advocacy. It becomes harassment by process. It forces courts to restate settled principles. It forces defendants to relive resolved cases. It forces taxpayers to fund litigation that produces nothing but another judicial reminder that the door is closed. That is not how justice systems are supposed to function.

Third time is not a charm. Third times a warning sign.

Aaron C Knapp

It signals that the goal is no longer to win in court, because winning is no longer possible. The goal becomes to cast doubt, to smear reputations, and to keep the controversy alive long enough that accountability can be delayed or diluted. That strategy does not hold up when a judge puts it in writing and calls it what it is.

Burnside’s ruling did not just end this motion. It ended the illusion that persistence could substitute for authority, and that repetition could overcome finality. The courts have spoken. Again. And again.

At some point, the responsible course is not another filing. It is acceptance.

And this time, the court made clear that acceptance is no longer optional.

And If the Ruling Stands, Accountability Does Not End Here

There is also a consequence of this ruling that explains, better than any press statement ever could, why this fight was pursued in the first place. By denying Cillo’s motion and refusing to unwind the 2021 and 2022 judgments, Judge Burnside left the legal landscape exactly where it already was. The criminal case is over. The exonerations stand. And with them, the civil litigation remains very much alive.

That matters, because the moment the criminal judgments became final, Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen were no longer fighting for their freedom. They were positioned to seek accountability. Wrongful conviction claims do not arise in a vacuum. They arise precisely because courts acknowledge that convictions should not have happened, that evidence was mishandled, suppressed, or distorted, and that people lost decades of their lives as a result. Burnside’s refusal to disturb those judgments means there is no procedural escape hatch left to shut that door retroactively.

This ruling leaves Smith’s civil case where it belongs, in the open, subject to discovery, testimony, and judicial scrutiny. There is no longer a pending criminal theory that can be used to cloud the issue or muddy the record. There is no revived indictment to point to. There is no suggestion from the bench that the exonerations were tainted or provisional. The court’s language confirms the opposite. The process was transparent. The judgments were valid. The case is over.

That is why this effort carried such high stakes, and why its failure is so consequential. Once the courts refuse to play along, the focus shifts from rewriting history to answering questions. Questions about how this case was built. Questions about what evidence was ignored or buried. Questions about who knew what, and when. And questions about what responsibility looks like when the system gets it catastrophically wrong.

If this ruling stands, and there is no indication from the court that it will not, the civil case proceeds without the shadow of a reopened prosecution. That is not vindictive. That is how accountability works in a system that claims to value the rule of law. Criminal finality does not mean institutional immunity. It means the venue changes from punishment to reckoning.

In that light, Burnside’s decision does more than end a motion. It closes the last procedural door that could have been used to delay or derail civil accountability. And it sends a clear signal that courts are not willing to let constitutional protections be repurposed as shields against responsibility.

The Double Jeopardy Reality That Cillo Could Not Wish Away

This is the point in the story where the law stops being optional, even for readers who do not live in courtrooms or speak in case citations. Judge Burnside, as reported, wrote that there is no legal authority to re institute the indictment and cited protections against double jeopardy. That sentence is doing far more work than it appears to be doing at first glance. It is the court stating, plainly and without hedging, that the Constitution itself blocks what Cillo was trying to do. Not policy. Not discretion. Not political will. The Constitution.

The basic concept of double jeopardy is simple precisely because it has to be. Once a prosecution ends in a way the law recognizes as final, the State does not get a second bite at the apple. That rule exists because the power of the government is enormous, and without firm limits, that power can be abused through repetition alone. Endless prosecution becomes punishment in itself. That is why finality matters. That is why dismissal matters. That is why courts treat the end of a case as the end, not as a pause button waiting for the next administration to feel differently.

When the charges against Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen were dismissed in 2022, the case ended. Full stop. The Associated Press reported that Judge Chris Cook dismissed the charges and that the prosecutor at the time stated clearly that the case was not coming back. That public representation matters. Courts rely on it. Defendants rely on it. The public relies on it. It is the point at which the coercive power of the State is supposed to stand down and stay down.

That is why this latest attempt was never just aggressive. It was constitutionally unserious. Even if one were willing to pretend that timeliness did not matter, or that final judgments could be casually reopened, the double jeopardy barrier remains immovable. You cannot undo a dismissal and pretend it never happened. You cannot resurrect an indictment after the prosecution itself ended the case. You cannot keep trying people until the politics feel better, the headlines soften, or the civil exposure becomes inconvenient.

That is the entire reason the Double Jeopardy Clause exists. It is there to protect people from exactly this scenario, where the State refuses to accept defeat or finality and instead searches for procedural contortions to keep the fight alive. Burnside’s ruling, as reported, recognizes that reality and states it plainly. There is no legal authority to do what Cillo asked, because the Constitution forbids it.

At that point, the effort stops being about legal disagreement and starts being about denial. Denial that the case is over. Denial that the State made a choice in 2022 that carries consequences. Denial that constitutional protections apply even when the outcome is politically inconvenient. Courts are not required to indulge that denial, and Burnside did not.

This is why the double jeopardy analysis is so devastating to Cillo’s position. It does not depend on sympathy for Smith and Allen. It does not depend on opinions about Tomlinson or Burge. It does not depend on how emotionally charged the original case was. It depends on a hard constitutional boundary that does not move. Once the prosecution ended, the power to prosecute ended with it.

Everything after that was noise.

And the court, finally and unequivocally, said so.

The Head Start Case Is Not Just a Case, It Is a Warning Label for an Era

The reason this story still provokes anger, exhaustion, and disbelief is because it is not merely about two defendants and one prosecution. It sits in the long shadow of the daycare panic era, a period in American criminal justice when fear outran evidence and when child testimony, investigative pressure, and community hysteria combined to produce catastrophic outcomes. That era taught us, painfully and slowly, that sincerity is not reliability, that repetition is not corroboration, and that moral panic can overpower professional judgment even inside institutions that are supposed to resist it.

The Head Start prosecutions were born in that environment. Allegations multiplied not because physical evidence emerged, but because narratives spread. Investigative techniques that would now be recognized as suggestive and improper were treated as normal. Skepticism was framed as indifference to children. Restraint was treated as complicity. In that climate, the absence of corroborating evidence was not a warning sign. It was brushed aside as irrelevant. The result was a set of convictions that aged poorly as the field of wrongful conviction analysis matured and as society began to reckon with the damage caused by that era’s excesses.

This broader context is not revisionist history. It has been documented for years by innocence advocates, legal scholars, and post conviction investigators. The University of Cincinnati’s Ohio Innocence Project has been explicit about how cases like this one fit into a national pattern, and about why they warrant skepticism when revisited through a modern lens. That work did not begin in 2021. It was the product of decades of research, litigation, and hard lessons learned from people who lost their freedom because institutions failed to question themselves.

That is why the public record from late 2021 and early 2022 matters so much. What happened then was not rumor or backroom dealing. The Lorain County Court of Common Pleas itself published documentation describing the grant of a new trial and the posture of the case. Those records exist independently of politics. They are primary source anchors that reflect judicial findings, prosecutorial decisions, and procedural steps taken in open court. They show that the system, belatedly, did what it is supposed to do when credible evidence of injustice emerges. It reviewed the case. It allowed litigation. And it brought the prosecution to an end.

Against that backdrop, Cillo’s attempt to reframe the exonerations as fraud does not look like vigilance. It looks like regression. It looks like a refusal to absorb the lessons of an era that has already cost too many people too much. It attempts to drag the conversation backward, away from accountability and prevention, and back toward denial and defensiveness. It treats acknowledgment of error as betrayal rather than as growth.

Lorain County did not need a prosecutor re fighting a war that history has already judged harshly. It did not need an effort to relabel transparency as corruption or to suggest that correcting injustice was itself suspect. What it needed, and still needs, is an honest accounting of how the original convictions happened, why safeguards failed, and what structural changes are necessary to ensure that the next moral panic does not produce the next irreversible harm.

Cases like this are not cautionary tales only when they end. They are cautionary tales when officials decide how to respond to them after the fact. Burnside’s ruling closed a legal chapter. The lesson it reinforces is larger. The justice system does not move forward by pretending the past was flawless. It moves forward by confronting failure directly and refusing to repeat it under a different name.

Why Bakersfield Still Matters

Bakersfield, California is not referenced here for drama or nostalgia. It matters because it shows, in real numbers and real lives, what happens when institutions respond to wrongful convictions with denial instead of accountability. Kern County did not collapse because courts overturned convictions. It collapsed because prosecutors treated those reversals as existential threats and doubled down rather than stepping back.

In Bakersfield, dozens of people were convicted during the daycare abuse panic with no physical evidence. Most of those convictions were eventually overturned. Two defendants died in prison before they could clear their names. The county ultimately paid millions of dollars in civil settlements, including a five million dollar award to one exoneree after nearly two decades of incarceration. Those outcomes were not the result of exoneration. They were the result of resistance to exoneration.

The most expensive decisions in Kern County came after the courts intervened. They came when officials refused to accept finality, continued to defend the indefensible, and attempted to preserve institutional reputation at the expense of truth. Each delay compounded the harm. Each act of defensiveness widened civil exposure. Each refusal to learn made the eventual reckoning more severe.

That is why Bakersfield still matters. It is the cautionary case study that shows how quickly denial turns into liability. It demonstrates that exoneration does not create risk. Retaliation does. Transparency does not invite collapse. Obstruction does.

Lorain now stands at the same decision point Kern County once faced. Burnside’s ruling draws a line Bakersfield did not draw soon enough. It says the case is over, the judgments stand, and the system will not be allowed to relitigate its way out of accountability. That lesson is not academic. It is written in decades of prison time, millions of taxpayer dollars, and a permanent loss of public trust.

History already ran this experiment once. Bakersfield is why there is no excuse to run it again.

The Resource Question Nobody Wants to Answer Out Loud

Here is the part of this story that local officials almost never want to confront honestly, because it forces a conversation they cannot control. Even if you accept, for the sake of argument, that Tony Cillo believed this effort was morally justified, that belief still does not answer the resource question. Motive does not excuse misuse. Conviction does not convert waste into prudence. And personal certainty does not suspend the obligations that come with managing a publicly funded office.

This was not a routine motion filed quietly at the margins of a docket. It was a high conflict, high visibility, labor intensive legal campaign. It required extensive research, drafting, internal coordination, and repeated court involvement. It required staff attorneys and support personnel to devote time and energy to a case that was not active, not ongoing, and not legally viable under basic principles of timeliness and constitutional finality. It required judicial resources, including the appointment and time of a visiting judge, to address an issue that had already been resolved years earlier. Every hour spent on this was an hour not spent elsewhere.

That matters because a prosecutor’s office does not have infinite capacity. Every office has tradeoffs. Every major undertaking displaces something else. When staff are working on a motion like this, they are not reviewing questionable convictions that still fall within lawful windows. They are not focusing on current cases that affect public safety today. They are not prioritizing victim services, charging decisions, or case integrity reviews that could actually produce lawful outcomes. Resource allocation is policy, whether officials admit it or not.

A public prosecutor is not a private attorney free to chase a theory simply because it feels righteous or personally compelling. This is not a boutique practice where billable hours are a feature rather than a liability. This is a taxpayer funded institution whose legitimacy depends on disciplined judgment. The public does not fund prosecutors to re fight closed battles. It funds them to enforce the law as it exists now, not as they wish it existed.

The court’s ruling only sharpens this problem. When a visiting judge denies a motion as untimely, rejects its core framing as empty and insulting, and grounds her decision in constitutional finality and double jeopardy, the outcome is not ambiguous. The court did not say this was a close call. It did not say the arguments were novel but unsuccessful. It said the effort ran headfirst into settled law. At that point, the question is no longer whether the office miscalculated. The question is why the miscalculation was allowed to proceed at all.

And yet, instead of reassessing, Cillo has publicly suggested that he may appeal. That suggestion should alarm anyone who cares about responsible governance. An appeal does not magically cure the defects the court identified. It does not erase the timeliness problem. It does not dissolve the double jeopardy barrier. It does not rehabilitate a fraud narrative that the court already described as empty. What it does do is extend the resource drain. It commits additional staff time. It incurs additional costs. It prolongs a fight that has already been decisively resolved.

At that stage, the question stops being about legal strategy and becomes one of stewardship. How many public dollars should be spent chasing a result the Constitution forbids. How many staff hours should be diverted to defend a theory that has already been publicly dismantled by a judge. How many times should taxpayers be asked to underwrite an institutional refusal to accept finality.

There is also an opportunity cost that rarely gets discussed. Every dollar and every hour spent on this effort is a dollar and an hour not spent preventing the next wrongful conviction. Not spent reviewing interrogation practices. Not spent examining forensic reliability. Not spent building safeguards that could actually protect the public and the innocent alike. Those are the investments that reduce liability, restore trust, and improve outcomes. This effort did none of that.

When officials insist on pressing forward anyway, even after a court has made the legal reality unmistakably clear, it stops looking like determination and starts looking like indulgence. Indulgence in grievance. Indulgence in legacy battles. Indulgence in the idea that persistence itself is a virtue, regardless of cost or consequence.

Taxpayers are entitled to better than that. They are entitled to a prosecutor’s office that understands the difference between enforcing the law and fighting history. They are entitled to leadership that knows when a case is over, when resources must be reallocated, and when accountability requires restraint rather than escalation. And they are entitled to ask, out loud, why anyone would consider appealing a ruling that left no legal ground left to stand on.

At some point, refusing to let go is not courage. It is waste.

What Was Not Being Done While This Was Happening

There is an omission in this story that is impossible to ignore once you see it, because it exposes the real cost of misplaced priorities. While Tony Cillo was devoting time, staff, and institutional energy to resurrecting a closed Head Start case that the courts had already resolved, his office was simultaneously ignoring a live, court approved investigative path sitting right in front of it.

Judge Ewers had already authorized investigative action in the McCann matter, based on filings I submitted. That was not speculative. That was not political commentary. That was a judge reviewing sworn materials and determining that further investigation was warranted. In other words, there was an active, judicially sanctioned opportunity for prosecutorial follow through on alleged misconduct tied to a current public official, one that implicated present governance and public trust rather than history.

And nothing happened.

Quietly or loudly, depending on how you measure silence, Cillo’s office chose not to act. No visible movement. No announced steps. No public explanation. No urgency. The contrast is striking. On one hand, an enormous push to relitigate a decades old case foreclosed by timeliness, finality, and double jeopardy. On the other hand, a judge approved investigative avenue involving contemporary allegations and a sitting power structure that simply sat untouched.

That disparity matters more than any press statement. Prosecutorial discretion is not exercised only by what an office pursues. It is exercised by what it declines to pursue. Choices reveal priorities. And here, the priority was clear. Energy flowed toward a symbolic fight with a predecessor, not toward a court sanctioned inquiry that could have demonstrated independence, courage, and a commitment to present accountability.

This is where the resource argument becomes unavoidable. Time spent on the Head Start motion was time not spent advancing the McCann investigation. Staff hours consumed by briefing a doomed fraud theory were hours not used to follow up on judicial authorization already in hand. The office did not lack things to do. It chose what to do.

That choice undercuts any claim that this was about justice in the abstract. If justice were the guiding principle, a court approved investigation into current alleged misconduct would not be treated as optional. If public safety and institutional integrity were the priority, the office would not leave a judge’s authorization sitting idle while chasing a constitutional impossibility elsewhere.

Instead, the pattern looks like selective enforcement of attention. Old cases are reopened when they threaten reputations or civil exposure. New cases are sidelined when they threaten existing power structures. That is not neutrality. That is preference.

When prosecutors want the public to believe that their decisions are driven by law rather than politics, consistency matters. Acting aggressively where the law says you cannot, while failing to act where the law says you may, is the opposite of consistency. It invites the conclusion that the problem was never workload. It was will.

And that is what makes this omission so damaging. Burnside’s ruling shut down a legally doomed effort. But the unanswered question lingers. Why was so much energy spent trying to undo the past, while a judge approved path to examine present conduct was allowed to gather dust.

That question does not go away just because the motion failed. It becomes sharper.

Because justice is not measured only by what you fight. It is measured by what you choose to ignore.

Where This Goes Next, If Cillo Tries to Keep It Alive

Cillo reportedly said he would meet with staff to decide whether to appeal. That statement sounds procedural and measured, but this is the point where leadership actually gets tested rather than performed. An appeal is always framed as a neutral option, but in reality it is a choice, and choices after a judicial rebuke carry consequences that go far beyond the docket number.

An appeal here would not be a routine disagreement between lawyers about unsettled law. Judge Burnside did not rule on the margins. She did not describe a close call or an ambiguous record. She rejected the motion as untimely, rejected the fraud framing as empty and insulting, and grounded her decision in constitutional finality and double jeopardy. Those are not fixable defects. They are structural barriers. Appealing in that posture does not signal confidence. It signals refusal.

This is where a loss can either end or metastasize. Prosecutors lose motions all the time, but wise prosecutors know when the court has spoken in a way that requires recalibration rather than escalation. Doubling down after this kind of ruling risks transforming a single failed filing into a pattern of poor judgment that the public will remember far longer than the original decision to file.

If the stated goal is to restore confidence in the prosecutor’s office, continuing to litigate the past is the wrong direction. Confidence is not rebuilt by rehashing battles with a prior administration, especially when courts have already closed the door. It is rebuilt through transparent decision making in current cases, through visible follow through on court approved investigations, and through a demonstrated understanding that constitutional limits are not obstacles to be gamed but boundaries to be respected.

There is also a credibility cost that comes with persistence for its own sake. At some point, an appeal stops looking like advocacy and starts looking like grievance management. The public does not expect prosecutors to be infallible, but it does expect them to be disciplined. It expects them to know the difference between proof and accusation, between disagreement and misconduct, and between lawful authority and wishful thinking.

This moment offers a clear fork in the road. One path leads toward acceptance of finality, a reallocation of resources, and a renewed focus on matters that actually remain within the office’s lawful reach. The other path leads toward continued litigation that courts have already signaled they will not entertain, increased public skepticism, and deeper questions about why this fight is being kept alive at all.

Leadership is not shown by how loudly you insist you are right. It is shown by whether you can recognize when the law has answered the question for you. If Cillo chooses to appeal, he will not just be challenging a ruling. He will be signaling how his office understands restraint, accountability, and the limits of its own power. That signal will matter long after this particular motion fades from the headlines.

Final Thought: When Is Enough Enough

At some point, the question stops being legal and starts being moral. When a prosecutor brands an entire set of open court proceedings as fraud, and a visiting judge responds by calling that framing empty and insulting, the fallout is not confined to a single motion or a single loss. It becomes a referendum on institutional temperament. It forces the public to ask whether the prosecutor’s office is functioning as a law office bound by evidence, restraint, and constitutional limits, or as a political operation locked into vendetta, legacy warfare, and performative outrage.

Because look at what has already happened. J.D. Tomlinson lost his job as prosecutor. He was publicly attacked through filings that accused him of corrupting the court. A recusal was forced through media pressure in a related matter. And now, yet again, his name is dragged back into the public square under the banner of alleged fraud, only to have a judge examine the record and say, in writing, that the accusation does not hold up. This was not the first attempt. It was not the second. Depending on how you count, this was the third serious effort to reframe Tomlinson’s handling of the Head Start case as criminal or illegitimate, and once again, it went nowhere.

So the question has to be asked plainly. When is enough enough. How much blood is enough blood. How many times does one former prosecutor have to defend himself for doing something the courts later confirmed was lawful, transparent, and final. How many times does the system get to take another swing at the same person, the same decision, the same closed case, before it stops looking like accountability and starts looking like retaliation.

This matters because the cost is not abstract. Every attempt to resurrect this case has a price tag. Staff time. Court time. Visiting judges. Briefing. Hearings. Administrative load. And now the specter of an appeal. All of it paid for by the public. All of it producing the same result. No charges. No overturned exonerations. No fraud. Just another judicial opinion explaining, patiently but firmly, that the law does not bend to institutional frustration.

Meanwhile, the real consequences pile up elsewhere. Civil litigation remains open. Wrongful conviction claims move forward. Liability exposure grows. Public trust erodes. And legitimate, court approved investigative paths into current alleged misconduct sit idle while resources are burned trying to undo the past. That is not justice. That is misdirection.

I have said from the beginning that this was never going to happen. It did not happen. The law was clear. The timelines were clear. The constitutional barriers were obvious. And yet the performance went on anyway, long after it should have stopped. The worst part is not that the motion failed. The worst part is that we all paid for the performance, knowing how it would end.

This is my opinion. I could be wrong. But the court’s words are not my opinion. They are written down. They are part of the record. And they leave behind a question that no appeal can dodge.

When is enough enough?

See our Previous Stories covering this matter:

“Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Long Shadow: From Wrongful Convictions to Public Contracts in Lorain County”

THE LORAIN HEAD START CASE

Nancy Smith Case: Full Legal History

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This article is commentary and opinion journalism. It is written for informational and public interest purposes only and is not legal advice. Nothing contained here should be interpreted as legal guidance, a legal conclusion, or a substitute for consultation with a licensed attorney. Readers should not act or refrain from acting based on this material without seeking appropriate legal counsel.

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Sources and Record
This commentary relies on contemporaneous reporting by the Chronicle-Telegram, Associated Press coverage of the 2022 dismissal of charges, regional television reporting, and publicly entered orders of the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas.

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