COLUMBUS, Ohio — Two of Ohio’s largest cities claim in a suit against a division of the state attorney general’s office that it failed to report criminal conviction information into state and federal background check databases, leaving them “dangerously deficient.”
Ohio’s capital city, Columbus, the city of Dayton, and a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense claim in their suit against Republican Attorney General Dave Yost’s office and Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation that the bureau’s failure to collect and maintain criminal history data could have deadly consequences. If the databases are incomplete, the plaintiffs say, so are the background checks run by gun shops, which means a gun could end up in the hands of someone with a disqualifying conviction.
The complaint, filed in Franklin County court Monday, cites news and government reports that found that a minimum of 27% of Ohio felony convictions in 2015 were not reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Between 2015 to 2018, at least 90 courts had gone months at a time without reporting any crimes that would prohibit someone from owning a gun, according to a Cincinnati Enquirer investigation referenced in the complaint.
Despite the reports and a working group ordered by then-Governor John Kasich to study the issue, the problems continued. In 2019, according to the complaint, the Ohio state auditor sent a letter to the governor, the state’s Supreme Court and the legislature declaring the state’s background check reporting system broken and in need of immediate attention.
The result of the unreported data, the complaint said, are massive gaps in the national background check system and Ohio’s own database, which is used for concealed-carry permits.
Clerks of court across the state are required by state law to send a weekly summary of each case involving a felony, but the complaint said that only a portion of that data ever makes the full trip to the database. Some of it is never entered by court clerks, the plaintiffs said, while other information has been lost through technological snafus. The complaint alleges the bureau focused entirely on issues with court clerks, rather than obtaining information on qualifying crimes “from wherever procurable.”
Gaps in the state database may have become public knowledge after local news reports exposed them in 2015, the complaint said, but bureau employees described it as a “widespread issue” as early as 2012. The bureau launched a project that was supposed to fix a part of the problem, according to the complaint, but it was canceled in 2014. A working group formed in 2013 to evaluate the issue advised that officials provide local courts with better mechanisms for submitting data on changes to firearm eligibility to state and federal databases.
According to the complaint, deficiencies in the system reduce the efficacy of background checks conducted on would-be gun purchasers and concealed-carry permit holders, and also affect pre-employment and pre-license background checks for teachers, police officers, firefighters, child care providers and foster parents. The plaintiffs cited examples ranging from a rape committed by a home health care worker with a prior felony assault conviction and an Ohio State University employee’s murder of a colleague as examples of crimes made possible by faulty background checks.
The plaintiffs are asking for declaratory and injunctive relief, or a writ of mandamus, finding that the bureau is “in default of its obligations” and directing the bureau and its superintendent to “promptly fulfill their mandatory, nondiscretionary legal obligations to procure disqualifying criminal history and other relevant information pertaining to all persons convicted of relevant crimes.”
The complaint noted that gun sales have “skyrocketed” since the Covid-19 pandemic hit America in late February. Between March and September of this year, more than 590,000 background checks were conducted of would-be firearms purchases in Ohio, which is a 70% increase from the same period last year, the plaintiffs say.
“The country has seen a spike in violence, and Columbus has not been immune,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said in a press statement released by Moms Demand Action. “We should all be deeply concerned that background checks may be failing to keep firearms out of the hands of violent offenders, putting our residents in a dangerous position.”
Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein said in the same press statement that citizens have been “falsely lulled into feeling secure with Ohio’s and the federal background check system.”
“Victims of domestic violence, schools and local employers rely on these systems to be accurate and to keep dangerous individuals unarmed and out of certain situations,” Klein said. “The system is failing our residents — particularly those who are most at-risk. Republicans and Democrats have all acknowledged our broken system, but those in charge have failed to do anything about it. It’s up to us to step in and try to make this right for everyone’s safety and security.”
Bethany McCorkle, Yost’s communication director, said the attorney general's office was investing millions of dollars to improve the system and is working to try to fix the problem.
“BCI is working with the court system and law enforcement agencies to ensure information is more quickly and accurately fed into the background check system as required. We cannot force them to provide the information. BCI is working toward having a process that is faster and the information is accurately verified. The problematic link in this chain is not BCI, as the complaint notes,” McCorkle said in a statement.
“This complaint has high drama, low substance, and no solutions. The best evidence of that is how we learned of it … through a press conference,” she added. “The utter lack of communication smacks of bad faith and is a poor mechanism to fix any problem.”
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