CLEVELAND — Due to a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case that narrowed the scope of the federal bribery statute, the U.S. District Court has vacated two of the 32 counts against former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, currently serving a 28-year sentence for accepting more than 100 bribes.
Dimora will be resentenced on June 8, 2022, after counts 12 and 13, the convictions for conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act extortion and Hobbs Act extortion, were vacated.
Those two counts are related to Dimora allegedly using his influence to pressure the Parma School Board to hire a man’s daughter in exchange for the man working on an expansion to Dimora’s outdoor kitchen for no charge. The court determined that while these actions may have been a bribe, they did not constitute an “official act” under the definition narrowed by the 2016 Supreme Court decision and did not violate the Hobbs Act.
Dimora was convicted in 2012 of one of the largest criminal corruption cases in the state's history. He was transferred from a West Virginia prison back to Ohio’s Elkton prison in 2017, where he was scheduled to be released in 2036 under his original sentence.
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