Not Now, Not Ever

The Ohio Supreme Court denied an application for admission and forever barred future application

Applicant, John David Tynes, of New Richmond, Ohio, is a 2013 graduate of Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. In June 2016, we found that Tynes failed to carry his burden of proving that he possessed the requisite character, fitness, and moral qualifications to practice law in Ohio. This finding was based on his efforts to minimize his culpability for nearly 18-year-old criminal convictions arising from his attempts to persuade girls under the age of 15 to engage in sex acts and on his delay in seeking mental-health treatment that was recommended at the time of his convictions. We therefore disapproved his application to register as a candidate for admission to the practice of law. Although the Board of Commissioners on Character and Fitness recommended that we prohibit Tynes from seeking admission to the Ohio bar in the future, we authorized him to apply for the July 2018 bar exam or a later bar exam.

After he reapplied

After a hearing, the board issued a report finding that Tynes had done little to alleviate the concerns that we raised more than three years ago and that the mere passage of time cannot cure those deficiencies. Therefore, the board recommends that Tynes’s pending applications be disapproved and that he be permanently denied the privilege of reapplying for admission to the practice of law in Ohio. No objections have been filed.

For the reasons that follow, we agree that Tynes has failed to carry his burden of proving that he possesses the requisite character, fitness, and moral qualifications to practice law in Ohio, disapprove his pending applications, and forever bar him from reapplying for the privilege to practice law in Ohio.

The crimes

Tynes was approximately 50 years old and serving in the military in 1998 when he began frequenting sexually oriented chat rooms on the Internet. In those chat rooms, he introduced himself to at least four females whom he believed to be under the age of 15. He later communicated with them privately through e-mail and instant messaging and eventually sought to meet three of them in person.

In Tynes’s first attempt to arrange an in-person meeting, he told a 13- year-old girl from Kentucky that he wanted to meet her and that he “desperately wanted to make love” to her. Id. at ¶ 6. But she discouraged Tynes from traveling to meet her by telling him that her parents had grounded her.

In his second attempt, Tynes was going home from a temporary military assignment when he traveled 300 miles out of his way, rented a hotel room, and e-mailed another girl to encourage her to sneak out of her home to have sex with him. After considerable discussion, the girl declined to meet him.

Several months later, Tynes attempted to meet a third girl as he traveled from Virginia to Las Vegas on business. He scheduled a layover in Chicago and rented a hotel room with the intent to make a video recording of their sexual activities. He telephoned her and arranged to meet her outside his hotel, but he was arrested by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he arrived.

He was tried, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Mike Frisch)