YOUNGSTOWN — Former Austintown trustee and Poland Township police officer Steve Kent has been released from the Mahoning County jail.

On Sept. 20, Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge John Durkin sentenced Kent to one year in prison after a jury found him guilty on a third-degree felony charge of tampering with evidence. Kent appealed the conviction and submitted a motion for a stay of execution on his sentence, which Durkin denied Sept. 22.

On Tuesday, Mahoning County Appeals Court Judges Cheryl Waite, Carol Ann Robb and Mark Hanni overruled Durkin and allowed for Kent’s conditional release from jail.

The Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office website and Mahoning County Common Pleas Court records confirm that Kent was released Tuesday afternoon.

“In this instance, absent a stay, appellant will serve all or a significant portion of the relatively short prison sentence before the appeal can be concluded,” they wrote, stating that denial of the stay would prejudicially impair Kent’s due process rights during his appeal.

The panel ordered that Kent be released on a $12,500 surety bond.

The jury in Kent’s trial found him not guilty on three counts of sexual battery, which were based on allegations that he forced or coerced a then 16- to 17-year-old student to perform oral sex on three occasions in 2021 while Kent was the student resource officer at Poland Seminary High School.

While state attorneys Kara Keating and Denise Salerno could not convince the jury on those counts, they did prove that Kent tampered with evidence.

The state showed, through testimony and digital data analysis, that Kent performed a factory reset on his phone on June 6, 2022, just one day after a Poland parent with whom he was having an affair told him she was aware of the student’s claims against him and intended to notify school officials and police.

In Kent’s filing with the court of appeals, defense attorney John Juhasz wrote that Kent has a “substantial likelihood of success upon appeal.”

Kent’s argument harkens back to his testimony during the trial. Kent then told the court that he performed the factory reset on his phone not because of legal concerns but because he was afraid that his daughter would discover information relating to his affair with the parent, Carla Bobbey.

During sentencing, Durkin said he could not think of a tampering conviction in which the defendant was a police officer, and agreed with state attorney Kara Keating that “as public officials, we are — and we should be — held to higher standards.”

Durkin told Kent: “A poor decision as to a factory reset unfortunately impacted the ability of law enforcement to conduct its full investigation.”

Kent was elected to the Austintown Board of Township Trustees in 2019 for a four-year term. He served most of that term before his conviction, but was removed the day after the jury rendered its verdict. Mahoning County Prosecutor Gina DeGenova notified the trustees that Kent’s conviction rendered him “incompetent” to serve as a trustee under Ohio Law.

He was replaced immediately by the former township administrator, Atty. Mike Dockry. Dockry will serve the remainder of Kent’s term until a new trustee is elected in November, at which point the new trustee will be sworn in immediately.