YOUNGSTOWN — A settlement agreement revealed Thursday that pays former assistant prosecutor Martin Desmond $550,000 to end 4 1/2 years of litigation against Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul Gains does not include a confidentiality agreement.

So even though Gains allowed one of his attorneys, Patricia Ambrose Rubright, to offer a few remarks about the settlement not being an admission of liability by Gains or Assistant Prosecutor Linette Stratford, Desmond and one of his lawyers had much more to say.

“The settlement was reached the night before Paul Gains was about to face withering cross-examination over his contradictory statements on his reason for firing Desmond,” said attorney Subodh Chandra, of Cleveland. “And he was going to be cross examined with FBI memoranda that the prosecutor’s office had wrongly withheld for years of litigation.”

The Mahoning County commissioners approved the settlement agreement by a 3-0 vote Thursday at their regular meeting. The agreement was called a “comprehensive” agreement and “release of all claims.”

The commissioners did not comment on the agreement at the meeting, but Rubright and Gains’ public information specialist Alan Rodges released a statement afterward and answered a few questions.

The statement said the agreement resolves the 2017 lawsuit Desmond filed against Gains after Gains fired Desmond in 2017. It also resolves the State Personnel Board of Review appeal Desmond filed, Rubright said.

The news release states that the county’s insurance carrier will pay two-thirds of the settlement, and the county will pay the other third. And when Rubright was asked whether the settlement would allow Desmond to return as assistant prosecutor, Rubright said no.

“Marty Desmond is not returning as an assistant prosecutor,” Rubright said.

Each party will pay for its own legal costs.

EMPLOYMENT ACTION

The news release quotes Todd Raskin, one of the lawyers with the Mazanec, Raskin & Ryder law firm of Cleveland that represents Gains, saying that Gains and Assistant Prosecutor Linette Stratford “deny Desmond’s claims and continue to maintain that his discharge was a legitimate non-discriminatory employment action.”

And Rubright added: “There is no evidence of liability at all.” She added that the decision to settle was an “economic decision” made after many years of litigation.

Gains fired Desmond in April 2017, saying it was because Desmond violated office policy by discussing a matter involving a case handled by former assistant prosecutor Dawn Cantalamessa with people outside the office, including a lawyer who filed a civil rights lawsuit against the county.

In Desmond’s lawsuit in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court and in his termination appeal to the State Personnel Board of Review, Desmond alleged Gains fired him for telling Gains that Cantalamessa had illegally filed charges of tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice against Kalilo Robinson, a witness in a murder case, allegedly to intimidate Robinson into testifying.

The charges against Robinson were dismissed, but Robinson’s lawyer filed the federal civil rights lawsuit over the issue. That suit later was dismissed.

Desmond withdrew the SPBR appeal March 22, the day before a hearing was set to resume in the case. Neither party would discuss the reasons for the case being withdrawn at that time.

THE SETTLEMENT

But Desmond said Thursday that Gains came to Desmond and his lawyers to talk about a settlement, after Gains turned over certain documents that Desmond said would have been damaging to Gains.

The settlement also was prompted by documents Desmond and his lawyers filed in the common pleas court case, Desmond said.

The State Personnel Board of Review hearing began in October but was halted after two days when Gains’ attorneys argued that certain allegations Desmond had made about misdeeds within the prosecutor’s office could not be introduced into the SPBR hearing because of a federal court order.

When the hearing was set to resume in March, the administrative law judge handling the matter indicated that the issues Gains said were off limits could, in fact, be introduced at the hearing.

“The notion that the county settled because they were suddenly cost conscious is absurd because they have nearly depleted a million dollar insurance policy,” Chandra said. “And what changed things was the fact that they finally realized they were going to lose catastrophically based on their production of the FBI’s evidence against the prosecutor’s office.”

The FBI documents go into great detail in discussing the FBI’s questioning of Gains regarding an assistant prosecutor with regard to alleged misconduct by the assistant prosecutor. Chandra filed the documents in the civil case in common pleas court.

“As soon as that was on the docket, and the SPBR hearing was going to start the next day, that’s when Gains decided to resolve the civil suit,” Chandra said.

Carol Rimedio Rigetti, chairman of the commissioners board, said late Thursday that the commissioners approved the settlement because “from my understanding, this is not an admission of wrongdoing. It was just an economic decision.”

She said the commissioners are the party that must approve such agreements, but “every elected official controls their own department.”

erunyan@vindy.com