YOUNGSTOWN — As required under a new Ohio law that limits how much time juvenile offenders can spend in prison, Chaz Bunch, 37, is scheduled for an Ohio Parole Board hearing next month.

It will determine whether he should be paroled for one of the most notorious rape cases in Mahoning County history.

The Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office has written to the board opposing Bunch’s release, calling the robbery, kidnapping and repeated rape of a 22-year-old Youngstown State University student a “horrific” crime.

His conviction and that of co-defendant Brandon Moore, 36, are based on the rape of a woman on Aug. 21, 2001. She was getting items out of the trunk of her car in preparation for going to her job at a Detroit Avenue group home when Moore approached her with a gun and ordered her into her car then drove away with her.

At the dead end of Peyatt Street in the city, the woman was ordered out of the car, and Bunch and Moore raped her repeatedly at gunpoint. The woman eventually was allowed to leave in her car.

Judge Maureen Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court sentenced Bunch to 89 years in prison. Later, he was re-sentenced and has a 49-year prison sentence. He has served about 19 years.

But in April, a new Ohio law went into effect that required Bunch and Moore to be eligible for parole after serving 18 years in prison. Bunch was 16 at the time of the crimes.

After the law took effect, Ralph Rivera, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, said the new law would require Bunch to get a parole hearing as soon as it could be scheduled. He said under the new law, defendants convicted of offenses as a juvenile are eligible for parole after 8, 25 or 30 years.

A jury found Bunch guilty in 2002 of three counts of rape, three counts of complicity to rape, one count of aggravated robbery, one count of kidnapping and eight gun specifications.

Over the years, Bunch has not shown any remorse for his crimes and continues to claim that he is innocent, “despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” the prosecutor’s office stated in a press release.

“I don’t know what bothers or haunts me more, that Chaz is claiming his innocence or the fact that people believe him. I am 100 percent sure that if people who signed the petition to Free Chaz Bunch knew the truth and the facts that occurred on Aug. 21, 2001, they would have never signed that petition, because, Your Honor, the facts and the truth that occurred that night over 18 years ago is still hard for me to talk about,” the letter states, quoting from the victim at the September 2019 re-sentencing hearing.

The victim also told the judge in 2019 that Bunch wanted to kill her but others stopped him.