CINCINNATI — A Clermont County man is taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court after he spent more than seven years behind bars awaiting trial while spending up to 23 hours a day in his Butler County Jail cell.
“If you asked me if this could happen to somebody in America, let alone a veteran, I would look at them and say that doesn’t even make sense, that couldn’t happen. But here we are,” said Eric Michael Schuster, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who performed two tours in Iraq.
“I just don’t think people understand the state of our justice system,” Schuster said. “Unfortunately, the judges have found ways, loopholes to get around any of your constitutional rights nowadays if they want to.”
U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black dismissed three child pornography charges against Schuster in 2023, after admitting that his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated.
Hear more of Schuster's story below:
Schuster got a job, furnished an apartment and began rebuilding his life as a free man with a clean criminal record.
But federal prosecutors appealed Black’s decision and asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the charges.
On May 2, a three-judge panel of the appeals court reversed Black’s decision, sending the case back to court for trial.
Now, Schuster fears he will be sent back to the Butler County Jail to await trial on alleged crimes that took place a decade ago. Meanwhile, the lead FBI special agent on Schuster’s case, Daniel Alfin, was shot and killed in Florida in an unrelated investigation in 2021.
“I’m going to lose everything I have rebuilt,” Schuster said. “The Butler County Jail is a horrible place … nobody wants to stall while they are in the Butler County Jail, I promise you that.”
The opinion, written by Circuit Judge John Bush, criticized Black for his negligence in failing to decide motions for 18 months, and blamed the U.S. Attorney’s Office for not prosecuting cases promptly, but laid most of the blame on Schuster.
“This is a difficult case, and the record before us should trouble any jurist … the court should have done more to move the case forward,” Bush wrote. “Nor was the conduct of the United States Attorney’s Office without fault. The district court may have been the primary cause of the government-imposed delays, but the office should have done more to assure the prompt adjudication of Schuster’s motions.”
Ultimately, all three judges decided that Schuster was more to blame for the overall delay.
“Schuster failed to sincerely assert his right to a speedy trial in a timely manner — Schuster’s litigation conduct as a whole indicates that he did not want a speedy trial. And his failure to demonstrate prejudice resulting from the delay slams the door shut,” Bush wrote in the May 2 order.
Schuster and his attorney, Bill Gallagher, both said they repeatedly tried to move the case forward, filing motions and reminding the judge to rule on them. Schuster even filed a misconduct complaint against Black in 2023.
“After this complaint was filed, I became aware of allegations that the subject judge had a backlog of pending motions in criminal cases,” wrote 6th Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton in a July 2024 ruling dismissing the complaint.
Sutton wrote that he discussed a remediation plan with the chief judge of the Southern District of Ohio.
“The chief district judge has worked with the subject judge (Black) to create a plan to resolve all pending motions in criminal cases. The subject judge no longer accepts new cases and is working toward resolving all outstanding criminal motions by Sept. 30 of this year, at which time he plans to take inactive status,” Sutton wrote.
In 2024, the WCPO 9 I-Team reported on Black’s pattern of extremely slow decision-making in recent criminal cases. Attorneys criticized him for neglecting criminal cases, ignoring inmates who filed emergency motions and keeping a dead person on his docket for more than a year.
Black did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office here declined to comment.
FBI agents arrested Schuster in 2016 as part of an international sting called Operation Pacifier. The government took over a dark web child pornography site, The Playpen, for two weeks in early 2015. It resulted in nearly 900 arrests worldwide.
When agents searched Schuster’s apartment, they found four internal hard drives kept in a box in his living room that contained thousands of images and videos of child pornography, according to the November 2015 criminal complaint.
Throughout 2018 and 2019, Gallagher filed motions to suppress evidence and challenge the government’s search warrant in Schuster’s case. Defense attorneys nationwide were seeking more information about the spyware code the FBI used to hack into the world’s largest child pornography site, which they felt pushed the limit of the government’s ability to search computers.
“We filed motions that deserved to have hearings. They were with the judge and waiting for hearings, and we weren’t getting them,” Gallagher said. “You can’t just sit on motions for years and not rule.”
Court records show that Black did not rule on the motions, so Gallagher said he took the unusual step of asking for a status conference in October 2020. Still, Black did not rule.
“Judge Black had been sitting on our motions for almost two years. I didn’t sit on my hands. Eric didn’t sit on his hands,” Gallagher said. “I don’t know how many times I’m supposed to ask a federal judge to do his job.”
Gallagher said this case is highly unusual, and if it involved a different crime, he doubted it would have been reversed.
“I’ve been doing this for 37 years. I think that if you’re charged with anything relating to children or sex offenses, it seems the judges work very hard to avoid bestowing any benefit to someone who is charged with those offenses,” Gallagher said. “Criminal practitioners will tell you that they think there is a sex offender exception to the Constitution at times that is used by judges.”
He worries not just about Schuster’s case, but the impact it could have on future criminal cases.
“If you allow someone to be incarcerated for six or seven years on any charge … you can do it today for child pornography, but can you also do it for someone charged with trespassing? With someone who is charged with a DUI? Can you do it to someone who is falsely accused of domestic violence?” Gallagher asked. “At what point is it still okay to detain someone for months, weeks, years without a trial?”
On June 11, the Sixth Circuit denied Gallagher’s request for a rehearing before the entire court.
Gallagher is now asking to stay the case from proceeding to trial, and to keep Schuster out of jail, while he asks the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal.
