Tracie Hunter is an American pastor in the Western Hills Church of the United Brethren in Christ, formerly a lawyer and a judge in Hamilton County, Ohio.
Early life and education
Tracie Hunter was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1967, to parents Charlotte and Stephen "Steven" Edward Hunter Sr, who raised their children, Tracie, Edward Louis, Erica, and Stephen Edward Jr., Catholic. She was the eldest of the four siblings. In 1986, 17-year-old Edward Louis, while a high school student, committed a string of armed robberies that ended in a confrontation with the police and him shooting himself.
Hunter completed her undergraduate education at Miami University, and earned a Juris Doctor professional degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
Lawyer
Hunter was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1993. She started working as an attorney advocate for neglected children and as a contract attorney with a public defender's office. At the same time, she worked as the general manager of the WCVG urban, gospel, radio station.
Elected as Juvenile Court judge
In 2010, following the retirement of Judge Thomas R. Lipps (R), Hunter submitted her candidacy for the judgeship in Hamilton County's Juvenile Court, to fill the position vacated by Lipps. In the primary, the county's Democratic chapter fielded Daniel Donnellon, son of Ed Donnellon, Municipal Court judge. Hunter won the race with 20,626 to 9,202 votes. She lost the November 2, 2010, election to John Williams, former administrator of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts and director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, who had served almost two decades as a prosecutor and magistrate, by nearly three thousand votes.
Hunter's campaign identified what were ostensibly significant issues with provisional ballots cast, and protested the result, eventually filing a federal lawsuit. In November 2010, Federal Judge Susan Dlott ruled that Williams should not take the office until the issue of the provisional ballots is investigated and resolved.
On January 10, 2011, upon assuming the office of Ohio Secretary of State, Jon Husted (R), ordered the Board of Election to officially declare Williams the winner without counting provisional ballots, but after two days, Judge Dlott ordered the Board to count more than 150 of the disputed provisional ballots that, as the decision stated, appeared to have been cast at the wrong precinct table "due to poll worker error." In April 2011, the Board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court but the high court declined to hear the case, sending it back to Dlott's District Court for the Southern District of Ohio Western Division. During the time the court was considering the case, on November 10, 2011, Ohio governor John Kasich (R), appointed John Williams to the Juvenile Court, making him senior judge.
On February 8, 2012, some seventeen months after the election, Dlott found for Hunter, while on March 16, 2012, she denied the Hamilton County Board of Elections' motion to stay further proceedings in this action. Following the court-ordered recount, Hunter was declared the winner by 71 votes and was sworn in on May 25, 2012. It was the first time the position of the judge in Hamilton County's Juvenile Court was filled by a woman and an African-American.
Judgeship
During her time as Juvenile Court judge, Hunter mandated that prosecutors turn over all critical evidence to defense lawyers, outlawed the shackling of juveniles in the courtroom, reduced "default judgments," and initiated a change of state election laws that eventually permitted ex-felons to vote. Additionally, she increased the court's staff training, assigned additional drivers for the transportation of offenders in order to reduce crowding in the vehicles, and mandated the provision of additional underwear to juvenile offenders who were previously often forced to share.
In subsequent statements, Hunter claimed that her "focus" was "on rehabilitation instead of incarceration."
Her decision, ostensibly based on expert testimony, to order the shielding of the faces of young convicts from the cameras and prevent their names from being in the media, taken, as she said, to help reduce the convicted persons' probabilities of recidivism, was met with strong objections by Cincinnati media, politicians, and commentators.