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By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief

CLEVELAND, Ohio-Former Cuyahoga County jail director Kenneth Mills was sentenced to nine months in jail Friday in connection with four misdemeanor counts of falsification and dereliction of duty.

He could not be sentenced to prison under Ohio law because all of his convictions are misdemeanors.

Visiting Judge Patricia Cosgrove, who presided over the trial in the case, issued the sentence recommended by prosecutors. Mills, however, will not serve in the county jail he oversaw and ran into the ground, a county jail that sits in the largely Black major American city of Cleveland.

He declined to speak during his sentencing.

Prosecutors say he lied to Cuyahoga County Council about why he blocked the  hiring of nurses inside the jail  where a string of eight inmate deaths occurred in  2018, the impetus behind the prosecution. Another died in 2019, and a couple more since then, though Mills has not been named as a culprit in the later deaths.

A county jury convicted him on four of five counts in September, two counts each of dereliction of duty and falsification, all misdemeanors. He won over the jury where it really counted, and was acquitted on a single felony count of tampering with records.

Sources said Friday that nine months is hardly anytime for the former jail director and that while he deserved to be prosecuted and subsequently jailed for his crimes, county officials used him as a fall guy to cover up their own corruption and malfeasance.

Mills did not take the stand at his trial last month, and he is the first of County Executive Armond Budish' top level jail administrators to be sentenced behind bars regarding the improprieties in a jail gone wild relative to disregarding the constitutional and statutory rights of inmates.

A damning report released in November of 2018 by U.S. Marshals on county jail conditions generated local and national news, a dreadful look at how inmates are mistreated such as withholding food for punishment, jailing juveniles with adults, rat and roach infested jail facilities, and a paramilitary jail corrections officers unit dubbed "The Men in Black" who intimidate and harass inmates.

The report also found profound mistreatment of female inmates, and that pregnant women were being jailed on floor mats and denied adequate healthcare.

Mills resigned in 2018 after the report came down.

Several lawsuits remain pending regarding the county's now infamous jail and the leadership of County Executive Budish, whose offices in downtown Cleveland have been raided twice since the series of jail deaths. And he remains under investigation by the FBI and other authorities.

There have been indictments of at least a dozen jail guards.

Former  jail warden Eric Ivey, who is Black, was also among those indicted.

Ivey took a misdemeanor plea deal with probation and no jail time before Common Pleas Judge Nancy Fuerst with an agreement that he snitched on others.

The current jail warden is Michelle Henry, a White woman and the jail's first female warden.

In the midst of it all sheriff Cliff Pinkney, the county's first Black sheriff appointed by Budish, resigned, his replacement being David Schilling, who later retired and has since been replaced with current Sheriff Chris Viland.

Pinkey has not been indicted and testified against former jail director Mills during his trial last month. He testified that Budish and Mills usurped his authority, including his recommendation to hire more nurses, and he said that they kept him out of the loop on key decision making activity.

The Cuyahoga County Jail is the state's second most populated jail behind Franklin County, which includes Columbus and is the largest of Ohio's counties. It has an inmate capacity of 1,436 and is routinely overcrowded.

The FBI and other authorities began swarming the jail in 2018 after inmates began popping up dead in mass.

The Cleveland jail merged with the county  jail per a regionalism plan adopted by county and city officials in 2017, which created nothing but more problems. Activists say the jail remains a problem and that they are also concerned with an array of other issues, including excessive bail, malicious prosecutions, racism, grand jury tampering, indictment fixing, denial of indigent counsel and speedy trial rights to Black defendants, and excessive sentences.

Data also show that White inmates were getting favorable treatment and that Black inmates were more harshly disciplined.

Cleveland community activists picketed in front of the Cuyahoga County Justice Center in 2018 over judicial and prosecutorial malfeasance, police misconduct, and the overcrowding of the county jail, a continuation of activist rallies that began in 2016. Hastened by the coronavirus outbreak, activists had been picketing regularly at the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland over jail conditions, in front of Budish' gated home in affluent Beachwood, where they called for his resignation, and at county administrative headquarters before county council meetings.

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