Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, who is campaigning to be Ohio’s next governor, wants to revive the use of a state database meant to better track sentencing decisions made by the state’s judges. 

Ramaswamy floated the idea during a recent campaign event in Cincinnati. He told the audience the idea came up during a meeting with city officials hours before the event and said such a resource could help the public know when a judge sets a bond for someone accused of a serious crime that’s too low. 

“I will tell you my number-one priority for me as governor is to make sure you as the public get that level of transparency from these judges, that if they’re letting people back on the streets, you at least ought to be able to know it and be able to vote them out and actually hold them accountable,” Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy didn’t get into the details during his event, organized as a town hall meeting to hear public safety concerns after a street brawl in the city went viral, thanks to a push from conservative influencers.

But the tracking system, which took four years to develop and cost more than $1 million, was rarely used and was ultimately abandoned in 2023 by the Republican-led Ohio Supreme Court. This has left citizens, social justice advocates and elected officials with no easy way to compare how judges dole out sentences from one jurisdiction to another. 

Ramaswamy’s motivation differs from those who originally backed the project, intended to highlight potential sentencing disparities based on race and other factors. 

Ramaswamy views the previous goal as “misguided,” spokesperson Connie Luck said in an email. But, he’s “open-minded to new models to improve government transparency and accountability.”

 “He will continue to listen to voters and engage in thought-provoking conversations. Ohio is ready for his fresh approach to open dialogue and his new kind of unifying leadership,” Luck said.

Project began as racial fairness initative

The criminal sentencing database project dates back to July 2020, when then-Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, announced it alongside Michael Donnelly, who at the time was a Democratic Ohio Supreme Court justice.

Then and now, judges publish all their sentencing decisions with their local clerk of courts’ office. But reviewing the information to evaluate all judicial decisions would require someone to review each document individually and load it into a spreadsheet.

The project envisioned having judges automatically report the information to a central collection point, where people could be free to analyze individual judges or courts’ sentencing practices, similar to other government transparency websites. 

O’Connor described the project as a racial fairness initiative. Organizers said data would help determine if judges were handing down similar sentences for defendants of different races or if judges were issuing wildly different sentences for the same crimes.

The Ohio Supreme Court launched a website the following June that judges could use to load their information into the platform. The process was more complicated than it may sound, though, since the first step required every judge, who otherwise operate independently, was to use the same format when uploading information about their sentences. 

The state went on to hire the University of Cincinnati to help set up a pilot program that could be expanded statewide. The court paid the university more than $1.3 million, according to state records. The process included developing what’s called a uniform sentencing entry — the standard form judges could use to report their decisions. 

Database becomes partisan issue in 2022 Ohio Supreme Court campaign

The project drew opposition from local judges, who said that the data could be taken out of context and used to attack them politically. They also argued the project might backfire against its goals of reducing unfair sentences, reasoning judges may respond by imposing tougher than needed sentences so they wouldn’t be criticized after the fact. 

It also became a wedge issue in the 2022 Ohio Supreme Court races, with Democratic candidates generally supporting the initiative and Republican candidates generally opposing it.

Donnelly and Democratic candidate Pierre Bergeron even touted the project in an op-ed for The Atlantic, saying it should be taken nationwide. Ohio’s lack of judicial transparency empowers judges to hand out disproportionately large sentences, or to discriminate against defendants, and leads to large, unchecked disparities in sentences, they argued. 

But in a 2022 op-ed with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Megan Shanahan, a Republican Ohio Supreme Court candidate, called the initiative “justice by spreadsheet.” She also questioned whether the data would be used to make some kind of automated judicial algorithm. 

“Voters elect judges, not databases,” Shanahan said.

Database project killed

All Republican Ohio Supreme Court candidates won their elections in 2022, including Sharon Kennedy, who defeated Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner, a supporter of the database project, in a race for chief justice. 

And then Kennedy canceled the project after taking office as chief justice in January 2023. 

Melissa Knopp, executive director of the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, said in an interview this week that this was because judges in only two counties ended up using the standardized format for recording criminal sentencing information — the first step needed toward creating the database. 

In public meetings, Kennedy has described her view that the court can’t tell local courts how to manage their case system, and described the program as lightly used. 

“Anecdotally, some judges have said to me that they are never going to buy into a system that they don’t actually know what it is that they’re going to collect, because to them, data … is used to attack them,” Kennedy said during a July 2023 state Criminal Sentencing Commission meeting.

But the criminal sentencing commission is continuing to work on a data collection initiative in lieu of the database project. Its current initiative is to compile a “data map” — or a list of what information is collected by which agencies already during the various steps of the criminal justice process. 

A spokesperson for the Ohio Supreme Court declined to comment on criminal sentencing data collection efforts, referring Signal instead to the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission. 

The sentencing database nearly got inserted into a sweeping criminal sentencing reform bill in late 2022, via language directing the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, a state panel that studies criminal sentencing, to continue work on the project. But the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Nathan Manning, removed it from the legislation during a committee hearing shortly after the election. 

GOP legislator, former Democratic justice respond

In an interview on Wednesday, Manning said he took the measure out to improve the bill’s chances of passing. He said the proposal gave “heartburn” to some who argued that it would be an expense for local courts and put pressure on judges, especially in smaller counties. 

But he said he’s open to continuing to explore the subject.

“It’s certainly something that I’d be interested in trying to find some common ground on,” Manning said. 

Donnelly, the Democratic former justice who lost his seat in the November 2024 election, said state Republicans have opposed judicial transparency efforts for years. But he said he was glad to hear Ramaswamy is interested in reviving the database project.

He said the current landscape in Ohio leaves lawmakers and the public in the dark about how the criminal justice system, which costs billions of dollars, is run. 

“If you’re talking about accurately collecting data from the 88 counties so policy makers and judges can make better informed decisions, I’m all for it,” Donnelly said. “But if you’re pointing your finger at the judiciary as the cause of the crime wave, that’s dangerous, it’s ill-informed and it doesn’t hold water.”