Prosecutor gets another chance to indict man on 13th DUI

YOUNGSTOWN — The prosecutor’s office has one more chance to get it right in Randy H. Bragwell’s 13th drunk driving case, a judge said.

“If they don’t indict this guy this Thursday, I’m dismissing this bogus indictment,” Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court said of the Mahoning County grand jury.

“It’s our intention to present it to the grand jury this Thursday,” for reindictment, J. Michael Thompson, assistant county prosecutor, told the judge in a Tuesday pre-trial hearing.

Bragwell’s case returned to Judge Krichbaum after the 7th District Court of Appeals vacated Bragwell’s guilty plea to his 13th drunk driving charge.

In August 2006, Judge Krichbaum sentenced the 54-year-old Akron man to six years in prison, fined him $5,000 and revoked his driver’s license for life.

The judge imposed that sentence after Bragwell pleaded guilty to the DUI offense with a repeat drunk driving offender specification. The sentence consisted of three years for the DUI charge, plus three consecutive years for the specification. Sebring police arrested Bragwell on that charge on March 28, 2006.

In its June 30 decision, the appeals court ruled that the repeat offender specification in the indictment was flawed because it didn’t include the required mention of five or more drunk driving convictions within the previous 20 years.

For more on this story, please see Wednesday’s Vindicator or Vindy.com.