When Serus Walters, a 20-year-old drifter with a taste for random violence, pleaded guilty on May 19 to three savage assaults in Cleveland, the victims thought the nightmare was finally over. Attorney David Dudley—64 years old, ribs fractured, shoulder cartilage torn, skull kicked like a football—sat in the courtroom waiting for justice. Instead, he watched it die. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Cassandra Collier-Williams quietly reduced Walters’ felonies to a misdemeanor and emptied the jailhouse door, crediting “time served.” There was no probation, no ankle monitor, no apology from the assailant—nothing but stunned silence from the prosecutor and gasps from the gallery.
Listen to Dudley, a veteran defense lawyer who has stood before “over a thousand judges” nationwide. After Williams’ ruling, he confessed: “I was fairly certain [Walters] was trying to kill me… I have never seen anything like this.”
Two days later, Walters was back in cuffs after another brush with the law in Garfield Heights. The cycle—arrest, release, repeat—rolled on, as certain as Lake Erie’s tides. And why not? Walters had already tasted the sweet indulgence of Judge Williams’ courtroom twice before: first after pummeling a man in Tower City on March 11, 2024, then again after kicking another victim near Whiskey Island hard enough to require stitches. Each time, the same judge sent him back onto the streets to hunt fresh prey.
Listen to Tony, the Tower City victim, whose glasses were smashed and head peppered with welts. “She just gave him time served… he’s a menace to society,” Tony said.
A menace, yes, but not a lone menace. A menace empowered by a black-robed enabler.
What Williams has done is not merely a misreading of the sentencing guidelines; it is a declaration of values. In her courtroom, the suffering of law-abiding citizens is secondary to the convenience of a confessed, repeat predator. In her worldview, the criminal justice system is a revolving door through which the violent pass unmolested.
We have walked this road before. In the 1960s, liberal jurists and academics assured America that criminals were victims of “root causes,” that bail was oppressive, and that prison was barbaric. By 1991, the nation’s homicide rate had doubled, and major cities bled population faster than they bled tax revenue. Then came the counter-revolution: broken-windows policing, truth-in-sentencing, three-strikes laws. Crime plummeted and order returned.
Now, like ghosts in the rear-view mirror, the same permissive philosophies have overtaken bench and bar, cloaked in buzzwords like “restorative justice,” “police reform” and “decarceration.” Judge Williams is their Cleveland apostle. The victims on Euclid Avenue are sacrificial lambs to a fashionable creed that prizes the criminal’s feelings above the citizen’s right to walk without fear.
This is not compassion; it is abdication. In America, the first obligation of government, before entitlements, before climate crusades, before foreign adventures, is the protection of its citizens. When a judge forgets that primary duty, she forfeits the public trust and should forfeit the robe. Ohio statutes empower the state Supreme Court to remove a judge for “Willful and persistent failure to perform judicial duties” and “Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice or that would bring the judicial office into disrepute.” The Ohio Board of Professional Conduct, the watchdog arm of the state Supreme Court, must investigate and recommend her removal from the bench to the state Supreme Court.
There is a war for the soul of American justice. On one side stand police officers, prosecutors, and terrified citizens; on the other, ideologues in robes who treat courts as social-work seminars. Neutrality is impossible. Each sentencing decision declares allegiance. Judge Williams has chosen.
Will Ohio protect its innocents, or coddle its predators? Ohio must slam the revolving door and lock it. Remove Judge Williams before Ohio’s broken promise of justice becomes even more broken bones in the streets.