CINCINNATI — A Fairfield man who spent more than seven years in local jails after his arrest on child pornography charges is now free after a federal judge took the rare step of dismissing his case because it had languished in the court system for too long.
Eric Michael Schuster, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with two tours in Iraq, spent 87 months mostly in the Butler County Jail where he stayed in his cell for up to 23 hours a day and had no face-to-face visitors beside his attorneys.
“He has not seen the sun since Barack Obama was president,” said Schuster’s attorney, Bill Gallagher. “In all of my years of practice I know of no one who has sat there as long as he has sat there.”
After years of delays, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black ordered Schuster’s release from jail on Sept. 15 because his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated.
“I feel like I was almost just kidnapped by the federal government,” said Schuster, who is 38. “One day they came and got me … they took me away from the face of the Earth for seven years and then returned me one day.”
Schuster is now living with his family in Clermont County and trying to rebuild his life.
“It completely ruined my life. I haven't seen my kids in eight years now or spoken to them or anything. My job was lost. A lot of my friends was lost due to this,” Schuster said.
Schuster’s case is not isolated. Gallagher said it exposed a pattern of extremely slow decision-making by Black on criminal cases since at least 2018. WCPO identified two other cases, including one where a defendant died before seeing an end to his case after nearly four years of inaction.
“His case unfortunately is not unique … There were a lot of criminal cases that were being ignored,” Gallagher said. “But this is federal court, and you don’t have a lot of ability to persuade or push a federal judge to do something if they choose not to.”
Black declined to comment. In an emailed response to WCPO, Black wrote, “The court speaks only through its docket. But thank you for reaching out.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office also declined to comment.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle Healey opposed the dismissal of Schuster’s charges, while simultaneously urging Black, “to resolve all the pending motions so Schuster can be brought to trial,” according to an August 15 court filing.
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.
“The images of child pornography also contained files consistent with sadistic and beastiality definitions, and included prepubescent children as young as infants,” FBI agent Pamela Kirschner wrote in the complaint.
A grand jury indicted Schuster on charges of possessing, receiving, and producing child pornography in May 2016, and a magistrate judge ordered him detained in jail awaiting trial, after he failed to report to the U.S. Marshal’s service and an arrest warrant was issued.
“I originally thought this would be over in a couple months. I planned on beating it,” Schuster said.
Schuster had an in-person status conference in front of Black on Oct. 5, 2017, court records show.
Eric Michael Schuster
“That was the last time I had court in any capacity,” and the last time he ever saw Black, Schuster said.
What happened over the next six years led Schuster to question the entire criminal justice system. He said he felt more like a prisoner in a hostile nation, than a United States citizen.
“I would watch TV and see things where the news is, you know, bashing Russia … for the way their court systems are,” Schuster said. “I would just laugh because I'm like, it's happening here in the United States. This is happening to me right now.”
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 asking for a status conference in October 2020. Still Black did not rule.
While Black’s civil cases continued to move through the court system at a regular pace throughout the peak of the pandemic in 2020, Gallagher said his criminal cases, “didn’t get the same attention.”
Gallagher, who is co-founder and advisor for the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati and past president of the Greater Cincinnati Defense Lawyers Association, said many criminal lawyers were frustrated by Black’s lack of attention.
“By this time Eric’s been locked up for five years,” said Gallagher, who has won state and national honors for his legal work. “While we were doing all this, I’m talking to other lawyers who were engaged in the same frustration, other prosecutors who were engaged in the same frustration.”
Then Black decided to retire, but the Schuster case stayed on his criminal docket.
“I write bittersweetly to advise you that, as of May 18, 2022, I will retire from active service and undertake senior status as a United States Senior District Judge … thereby creating a vacancy for you to fill. I intend to continue as a judge, simply at a reduced role,” Black wrote in a letter to Pres. Joe Biden on November 18, 2021.
Former Pres. Barack Obama appointed Black as a federal judge in 2010. He is well-known nationally for authoring the first federal opinion recognizing same-sex marriage which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Earlier in his career Black served as a U.S. magistrate judge, a Hamilton County Municipal Court judge, and as a trial attorney at Graydon Head & Ritchey.
“He’s done so many great things that I think that’s what’s even more hurtful to us in the criminal defense bar because, he’s so capable,” Gallagher said about Black. “We cannot figure out for the life of us why criminal cases just became so difficult for him to adjudicate, decide and manage.”
Gallagher said he’s spoken to 15 to 20 criminal defense lawyers, and every prosecutor in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Cincinnati, who have all recounted similar experiences with Black.
"There were a lot of cases being ignored,” Gallagher said. “There were other people in the Butler County Jail who were presumed innocent who had criminal charges that were pending, who themselves were not getting their cases resolved in time and were waiting. It was extremely unfortunate.”
In the meantime, Schuster’s case hit a major obstacle.
In February 2021, the lead FBI special agent on Schuster’s case, Daniel Alfin, was shot and killed in Floridawhile executing a search warrant at a suspect’s home in an unrelated investigation.
“Our motions had been pending for 20 months before Agent Alfin was killed,” Gallagher said, and without him to testify in court to explain the investigation, “we were left at a severe disadvantage.”
Gallagher filed a motion to dismiss in late 2022 and a second motion to dismiss in April 2023, urging Black to release Schuster. The Sixth Amendment guarantees anyone accused of a crime the right to a speedy and public trial. The Speedy Trial Act mandates trial within 70 days of an indictment or first court appearance.
“Despite Mr. Schuster’s repeated efforts to urge this court to take some action in this case, its silence has been deafening,” Gallagher wrote in his April 3 motion. “Over the course of his pre-trial detention, now approaching 2,500 days, Mr. Schuster has had no in-person visits with family, has not been outside in an exercise yard, has had no exposure to the sun and has received virtually no medical and/or dental services.”
Black denied the motion on May 5.
“The court finds no violation of the Speedy Trial Act and, therefore, dismissal is not warranted. Moreover, the court finds that there has been no violation of defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial,” Black wrote in his order.
Gallagher asked the judge to reconsider his decision in a July 25 motion, “it would be a manifest of injustice to allow the government to continue its prosecution against Mr. Schuster.”
On Sept. 15, Black granted Schuster’s motion, without accepting blame for the delays in the case.
In fact, Black used his 15-page order to criticize Gallagher for, “hyperbole, miscalculations, and knowing misstatements regarding the court’s actions and intent,” for attacking him with “flagrantly false statistics.”
The same day that Black issued his order, Schuster was released from the Butler County Jail.
“I was sitting in my cell, and they came across the speaker and just told me to pack it up that, I'm getting released,” Schuster said. “I thought 'am I being in transferred or something?'”
Once he stood outside in the fresh air, Schuster said he couldn’t believe it how he felt.
“My mother and my brother came to pick me up and I gave them hugs instantly,” Schuster said. “That's the first hug or contact I've had with another person in over seven years. You shouldn't do that to a person.”
Schuster wants to get a job, but he worries that prospective employers will hear about his case and not hire him, despite not having a criminal record.
“I understand the nature of the allegation. It’s alarming and it’s concerning,” Gallagher said. “He was presumed innocent. He’s still innocent. He’s never been convicted.”
Gallagher did not file a complaint against Black in this case because he said it would have been heard by other federal judges and he didn’t think they would discipline one of their own. Federal judges have life appointments.
While Schuster was in the Butler County Jail, another inmate was dealing with an almost identical situation.
Nicholas Edward Kurtz was awaiting trial on charges that he forced underage girls to be his online sex slave. Like Schuster, was waiting on Black to rule on pending motions about evidence and other issues in his case.
And like Schuster, his key witness in the criminal investigation, Warren County Police Sgt. Larry Cornett, had died while Kurtz was in jail awaiting trial.
“What has transpired in this present case is nothing short of an absolute extinguishment of one’s right to a fair, speedy trial, and the presumption of innocence,” Kurtz’s attorneys, Jon Paul Rion and Eric Nemecek wrote in a March 2022 motion to dismiss, threatening to go above Black to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals for help.
Rion and Nemeck did not respond to a request for comment.
“To date, Kurtz has been incarcerated for over seven years, pending trial. This constitutes a grave transgression of Kurtz’s ‘presumption’ of innocence,” his attorneys wrote. “Kurtz has already been incarcerated longer than the mandatory minimum sentence required for the pending charges in this case.”
Black denied Kurtz’s motion to dismiss in September 2022, "the court finds the delay has not deprived defendant of his constitutional right to a speedy trial."
Two months later, Kurtz agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of cyberstalking, which did not require him to register as a sex offender.
Meanwhile Abdullah Luqman’s case is still pending on Black’s docket since his indictment in 2018 for selling counterfeit luxury items such as Gucci shoes and Louis Vuitton bags.
While Luqman was released from custody awaiting trial, nearly four years have gone by without a single hearing, decision or court filing in his case.
“While the case is literally still pending, I expect it will be dismissed in the next few days. I just learned a little while ago Mr. Luqman passed away earlier this year,” Luqman’s attorney, Jay Clark, wrote in an email to WCPO.
Eric Michael Schuster Order Dismissing Case by WCPO Web on Scribd
