By: ShaCamree Gowdy

The Black community in Ohio and beyond is calling out the justice system after a Black woman received a harsher punishment just a day after a white woman went to court for the same crime. 

Debbie Bosworth, a clerk in the Chagrin Falls village utilities and construction departments, stole more than $248,000 from residents’ utility bills over a 20-year period by pocketing cash and shifting money from the building department to the utility department to mask the fraud, per Cleveland.com’s Corey Shaffer. On Monday, she was given a two-year probationary period. 

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Karla Hopkins worked at a local high school as a secretary and executive assistant. She was responsible for collecting various dues and fees from teachers and students and forwarding the funds to the school treasurer with money and receipts. Instead, Hopkins pocketed $42,000 of the more than $71,000 over the course of a year, and was charged in May 2020 with a single crime of third-degree felony theft in office. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Tuesday. 

“It’s kind of hard to figure how you can end up with results that are so different for similar kinds of actions,” former longtime Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine said, as reported by Shaffer. “Cases like these point out the need for the system to do a better job of reviewing the data because there’s lots of disparity between the way that people of color and white people are treated. But it doesn’t get captured because nobody’s really looking.” 

Adrine is one of many current and former judges, as well as leaders of Black faith and labor organizations, who believe that the “stark disparity” in sentences undermines the criminal justice system’s credibility. This is reinforced by the perception that judges disproportionately punish people of color and those without means. 

“I think it reinforces the lack of trust in the justice system,” said Danielle Sydnor, president of the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP, per Shaffer. “These types of things are the way the system was designed, and they will continue to happen if we don’t have large-scale reform.” 

Bosworth’s attorney said in court that some of the money she embezzled went toward her children’s education, but she managed to pay it all back by using her pension savings and writing a check for the remaining $100,000 the day of her sentencing. 

Because Chagrin Falls Mayor William Tomko did not request incarceration in a letter read aloud in court and she paid back all of the money, Judge Hollie Gallagher decided on probation. 

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Hopkins told Judge Rick Bell after the school fired her, she emptied her pension and received roughly $20,000 after taxes to pay her debts. Her attorney said she started taking the money while battling with mental health concerns and a gambling addiction, but that she has since received therapy and completed a job placement program. She was, opposed to Bosworth, chastised by the judge for taking the pension money and sentenced to six months longer than the assistant prosecutor requested. 

Both judges declined to comment on their sentences, but court spokesman Darren Toms said in a statement that “every case that comes before the Court has a unique set of circumstances that are taken into consideration at sentencing.”