YOUNGSTOWN — Lawyers for Kimonie Bryant, a defendant in the September 2020 shooting death of Rowan Sweeney, say a judge should find Bryant breached his plea agreement and set the case for trial, or find he did not and enforce the plea and sentencing agreement.
Defense attorneys John Juhasz and Lynn Maro filed a response to an April motion by Mahoning County prosecutors, which gives notice to county Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony D’Apolito that prosecutors want Bryant, 27, to get more than the 20 years to life in his plea agreement because he lied about facts of the case in what prosecutors call a “proffer.”
A proffer is an agreement by a defendant to certain facts he or she will testify to at trial.
In his proffer, Bryant said he drove co-defendant Brandon Crump, 21, to the home on Perry Street in Struthers where the killing took place, and Crump got out of the car and was gone for two to three minutes. When he returned, Crump got in the car and Bryant drove away, it states.
While Crump was in the house, he killed Rowan, 4, and also seriously wounded four adults by shooting them in what started as a robbery, according to evidence presented at Crump’s trial.
“Crump mentioned that he may have shot someone,” the filing states, quoting from Bryant’s proffer. Bryant also stated he dropped Crump off at Crump’s home on Dewey Avenue on Youngstown’s South Side after leaving Struthers, and then Bryant drove to his home on Cassius Avenue on the East Side.
During the proffer conversation with Mike Yacovone, former assistant prosecutor, Bryant said he never received any of the money Crump stole during the robbery and shootings. Bryant was supposed to get money the next day, but he was arrested the next day, the document states.
However, in preparation for Crump’s trial, prosecutors met with two agents of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. They discussed cellphone data that showed the locations of the cellphones of Bryant and Crump on Sept. 21, 2020, the night Rowan was killed. The data indicated that instead of Bryant and Crump traveling from Struthers to Crump’s home, their phones traveled to Bryant’s home first.
Yacovone and assistant prosecutor Jennifer Paris met with Bryant and his counsel to prepare for Bryant’s anticipated testimony at Crump’s trial in February.
“During that meeting, Bryant revealed that he and Crump went to Cassius and split the money that Crump stole from” the Perry Street home, the filing states. That statement was “in direct conflict with the defendant’s claims in his Nov. 7, 2023, proffer that he did not see the stolen money again and that he and Crump were supposed to split the cash the following day,” the prosecution filing states.
“It became clear that (Bryant) lied during his proffer while under oath,” the prosecution filing states. “Because he lied, (prosecutors) informed the defense that it would not call (Bryant) as a witness at Crump’s trial,” and no statements from Bryant were used at the trial, the filing states. A jury found Crump guilty on all counts without Bryant’s testimony.
The defense filing states Bryant did not breach the terms of his plea agreement, and it “therefore needs to be enforced in its entirety.” The prosecution “received benefit from the agreement and obtained critical information which led to the conviction of Brandon Crump,” it states. Bryant “remained ready to testify throughout the Crump trial.”
The prosecution wants to add five more years to the 20-years-to life sentence in Bryant’s plea agreement, the defense filing states. But “everyone wants this case to be finished,” so having Bryant’s plea agreement voided and Bryant’s case being set for trial would not make many people happy, the defense filing states.
It also argues the proffer and plea agreement are shaped by contract law, and those laws should guide the judge’s decision on whether to allow prosecutors to recommend a higher sentence for Bryant.
“When A and B enter into a contract and there is a claim of breach, first we must look at the contract itself,” the defense filing states, giving an example of a factory buying items from a supplier and requiring the items to arrive by a certain date and time. If the supplier met the terms of the agreement in all material terms, then the contract was not breached, it states.
That is the case with Bryant, the filing argues. Bryant lied about one detail to protect his girlfriend from possible prosecution over the proceeds of the robbery, but it was “not material in terms of the reason that (prosecutors) wanted to use him as a witness at trial,” the defense argues.
Prosecutors do not want to void the entire agreement, only the part related to its sentencing recommendation, but “plea agreements, like other contracts are not to be enforced piecemeal,” the defense states.
D’Apolito “has two possible remedies to choose from which depend on the circ*mstances of the particular case, either specific performance of the agreement or withdrawal of the plea,” it states.
“If the government has violated the plea by now refusing to recommend 20 years to life, the sole question is whether Bryant should be permitted to withdraw his plea,” it states.
Prosecutors are “not asking this court to rescind the plea agreement. The defense is every bit as mindful as anyone else that this has been pending for three and a half years, and the victim’s family and everyone else needs closure,” the defense filing states. “Yet the state’s actions here are prolonging the case.”
It argues adding five years to Bryant’s sentence may not matter much since it is “unlikely that the defendant would be paroled at the first hearing anyway.”
The filing argues the reason prosecutors did not call Bryant to testify in the trial of Crump Jr. is Bryant’s testimony would have contradicted the state’s theory of how the plan to commit a robbery at the Struthers home took place.
Prosecutors said in their opening statement there were two phone calls between co-defendant Andre McCoy and Bryant after McCoy arrived at the Struthers home and there were text messages between McCoy and Bryant in which McCoy told Bryant he did not have to worry about anyone in the house having a gun and where to enter the home.
But Bryant would have testified that there was a meeting much earlier Sept. 20, 2020, involving McCoy and Bryant, and that was where the plan to commit the robbery was formed, the filing states.
The defense filing quotes from McCoy’s testimony at Crump’s trial to try to convince the judge that prosecutors did not want Bryant to testify because he would have said that he and McCoy set up the robbery earlier Sept. 20, not late in the evening.
Have an interesting story? Contact Ed Runyan by email at erunyan@vindy.com. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @TribToday.
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