Ashlie Case Sletvold

A camera in the medical dispensary of the Cuyahoga County jail recorded what happened to Deonte James on October 27, 2019. James was a pretrial detainee, jail officials had placed him under full-time suicide precautions, and that day he had been treated in the dispensary for a cut on his finger. On the video he asks a jailer whether he can pull up his pants. Officers struggle with him, one jailer tells another to use pepper foam, and while the others hold him down an officer sprays foam into his eyes at point-blank range for about four seconds.

James’s complaint described him as mentally impaired and said he had indicated an intention to harm himself. It described two days that October. On October 18, when he refused to undress as a safety measure and covered himself with a blanket, a sergeant sprayed pepper spray in his face. On October 27, after his treatment in the dispensary, he stood up from his seat. Several officers restrained him and bent him over a desk while two others sprayed oleoresin capsicum foam in his face. Three officers then pinned him face down on the floor, and a fourth sprayed foam into his eyes from a distance of one inch. Officers strapped him into a chair and wheeled him out of the room.

The county disciplined the officer who sprayed James’s eyes. Its human resources director wrote that he had “deployed multiple bursts directly into the face of the inmate even after he was secured to the floor,” and the county suspended him for five days. About three months later it suspended him again, over another incident.

On October 15, 2021, Ashlie Case Sletvold and her co-counsel, Jessica Smith Savoie, sued Cuyahoga County and three corrections officers, Adam Broeckel, Damien Bodeker, and Frederick Barthany, in federal court in Cleveland, and the case went to U.S. District Judge J. Philip Calabrese. To the complaint they attached the Quality Assurance Review of the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, a Corrections Center Report of Investigation, and an April 25, 2019 memorandum. “As he tries to pull up his pants an attack ensues that is unjustified, unnecessary and unconstitutional,” Sletvold said that day. “I think the basic level of care that a person in the midst of a mental health crisis needs is the patience and understanding,” she said. In her words, James had received “instant brutality” instead, and the county “needs to train its corrections staff to use appropriate—and only appropriate—amounts of force.”

The discovery that followed turned on the jail’s cameras: the footage of the two incidents in James’s complaint, and the footage of force officers had used on other inmates in the jail’s mental-health unit. James’s lawyers later told Calabrese that they had asked Cuyahoga County for jail video more than twenty-five times over sixteen months, and Sletvold argued that they had found 450 videos of potential abuse of inmates with mental illness over a two-year period. The fight over that footage occupied status conference after status conference, a motion to compel, and a motion to disqualify the judge before Calabrese ruled, on May 2, 2023, that the county had withheld discovery for improper purposes.

A Motion to Disqualify the Night Before the Fee Hearing

The county objected to producing the videos on grounds of relevance, proportionality, and privilege. Calabrese took the dispute up conference by conference. At one in November 2022 he ordered the county to produce fourteen videos responsive to James’s requests and directed James’s lawyers to file a motion to compel on the rest. They moved for sixty videos that corresponded to jail use-of-force reports, and for removal of the confidentiality designations the county had placed on footage it had already produced. After the seventh status conference in the case, Calabrese granted the motion on December 28, 2022.

Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, a party whose conduct made a motion to compel necessary ordinarily pays the cost of bringing it unless its position was substantially justified. Calabrese set a hearing on attorney’s fees. “After 8:00 p.m. on the night before the hearing on attorney’s fees—some 469 days after Mr. James filed suit and some 280 days after the Court’s sanctions ruling in Brack—the County filed a motion to disqualify,” he later wrote. Dave Lambert, the county’s top civil lawyer, had brought the motion, and Sletvold asked Calabrese to sanction him for delaying the case.

The county’s motion relied on the opening of Calabrese’s sanctions opinion in Brack, an earlier case in his court: “Since 2018, more than twelve detainees have died at the Cuyahoga County jail, numerous others have suffered serious injury, conditions remain deplorable, and significant litigation continues in State and federal court to determine the legal consequences and responsibility, if any, relating to maladministration at the jail.” The county also pointed to Calabrese’s work before he took the bench, when he was one of several lawyers, serving pro bono, listed on a December 2018 complaint against the county over jail conditions that sought prospective injunctive relief.

Calabrese denied the motion on March 10, 2023. The Brack passage, he explained, addressed public matters and made no factual findings: “None of those statements prejudges any particular set of facts or actor.” He found no actual or apparent bias under the federal recusal statute, and he addressed the timing directly: “Holding back a recusal motion ‘as a fallback position in the event of adverse rulings on pending matters’ is as improper procedurally as it is professionally.”

The Fee Ruling of May 2, 2023

Calabrese then ruled on the fees. He found that “at nearly every turn the county put up roadblocks, dragged its feet, hid the ball and otherwise withheld discovery for improper purposes,” and he ordered Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office to pay James’s lawyers for the time they had spent getting videos the county was legally required to produce. “In short, the county’s discovery conduct delayed this litigation and increased the parties’ costs without substantial justification,” he wrote.

The prosecutors had argued that the county’s lawyers acted properly, that finding and producing the videos took enormous time and resources, and that a fee award would be unfair because taxpayers would bear it. Calabrese rejected each argument. The county, he wrote, had “slow walked” the videos. As for the taxpayers, “Stewardship for public dollars falls to the county, its officials and its lawyers, and the county does not enjoy a special exception or immunity,” he added. He would set the amount later. The prosecutor’s office, in his words, “has no one to blame for its predicament but itself.”

The two sides agreed that the county would produce sixty videos, with more to follow, and Calabrese scheduled mediation for June 28. Sletvold said after the ruling: “You can’t resort to violence as the first step in dealing with people with mental illness.”

Ortiz v. Kazimer and the Surrendered Suspect

Before she joined Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, Sletvold practiced at the Chandra Law Firm, a Cleveland civil-rights boutique where she represented people injured by police misconduct, jail abuse, workplace discrimination, and constitutional violations. She had begun on the other side of the courtroom. A philosophy graduate of the University of Akron, summa cum laude, and a graduate of Yale Law School, she went first to a global law firm, defending corporations in product-liability litigation. In 2005 the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism had published her article “Conflicting Feminisms and the Rights of Women Prisoners.”

At 4:59 p.m. on August 16, 2010, Cleveland police received a call from a man who said he had been robbed by a man who stuck a gun in his back and demanded his wallet. Officers Brian Kazimer and Dan Crisan drove to an apartment complex to investigate, and as they pulled up they saw someone who matched a suspect’s description start running. Kazimer gave chase. The person running was Juan Ortiz, a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy with Down syndrome who stood under five feet tall and weighed a little over 100 pounds; he had been playing in the yard of the west-side complex, listening to his Walkman. A resident repeatedly told Kazimer about Juan’s disability. “Shut up, get out of my way,” the officer responded.

Juan stopped in the parking lot where his family was waiting. Witnesses said Kazimer took him from his mother’s arms, slammed him against an SUV, and kept him pinned there for about fifteen minutes while he cried out in pain and made no effort to resist. Crisan, several witnesses said, did nothing but hurl racial slurs at the onlookers. “The ordeal ended only when the police dispatcher radioed the officers that the true robbers had been apprehended nearby,” the Sixth Circuit later wrote. “The officers let Juan go free.” Juan was left with chest pains, abrasions, and post-traumatic stress.

Witnesses at the complex later gave sworn declarations about what the officers said. Nina Kennedy, the apartment manager, declared that one officer told Juan’s parents to “go back to their own country.” Jean Posey, who had been babysitting her grandchildren there, declared that an officer told Juan’s mother to “get the hell back to where she belongs.” Kazimer told Juan’s father that he was “lucky he didn’t shoot” the boy, the family said. The SUV was hot, and the family’s lawyers said Juan’s lower abdomen was burned against it badly enough to require surgery. The Ortiz family later moved out of state.

Juan and his parents, Ramon L. Ortiz and Alma I. Perez, sued both officers in federal court in Cleveland. On March 26, 2015, U.S. District Judge Lesley Wells held that the excessive-force claim had to go forward, reasoning that force used after a suspect has been incapacitated or neutralized is excessive as a matter of law, and she let the failure-to-protect, battery, negligence, and negligent-infliction-of-emotional-distress claims proceed with it. The officers appealed on qualified immunity.

Donald Screen argued the appeal for the family; Sletvold and Subodh Chandra joined him on the brief. Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote for a panel with Judges Guy and McKeague, and he opened with the plaintiffs’ evidence: “Eyewitnesses saw a police officer chase down a sixteen-year-old boy with Down syndrome, take him from his mother’s arms, slam him against an SUV, then pin his face against the car, all while ignoring pleas from standers-by that he was a harmless teenager.”

For the appeal, the officers accepted that Kazimer had slammed a surrendered suspect and then pinned him while Crisan watched. They argued that suspects sometimes fake a surrender to escape or attack, that residents gathering around made the scene chaotic, and that the eyewitness accounts were improbable. Sutton answered each point. “But Kazimer fails to identify any feature of Juan’s surrender that would give a reasonable officer pause that Juan was fabricating his submission to the officer’s authority,” he wrote; Juan had stopped moving, was hugging his mother, and stayed limp after he was shoved against the car. A chaotic scene might justify some force, but not the force the witnesses described, and nothing in the record blatantly contradicted them. Crisan, who saw Juan pinned and heard his cries, could be liable for failing to intervene, and Kazimer’s conduct, as the witnesses described it, was reckless enough to defeat Ohio’s statutory immunity on the state-law claims. On February 4, 2016, the court affirmed the denial of qualified immunity and left the officers’ account and the witnesses’ account for a jury.

The case settled on the eve of trial, at the final pretrial conference before U.S. District Judge Patricia A. Gaughan on October 24, 2016. Cleveland agreed to pay Juan $250,000.

After the settlement Sletvold went after the officers’ discipline. The city’s Office of Professional Standards had sustained the charges against both officers in November 2010, and that month the Civilian Police Review Board recommended discipline. Pre-disciplinary hearings set for August 2011 were held in abeyance while the lawsuit went on, and in the fall of 2015 the city promoted Crisan to sergeant. On September 28, 2017, Sletvold asked the city’s public-records office for the Office of Professional Standards file on complaint 10-339, the records of any pre-disciplinary hearing, any discipline imposed on Kazimer or Crisan, and the city’s communications about it, searched for wherever they were kept, including personal email accounts and phones. “We expect to receive your complete response by October 15, 2017,” she wrote.

No records came. On October 16 she wrote to the records office again: “We still await responsive records. We will file with the Court of Claims absent a complete response by 5:00 p.m. tomorrow.” On October 24, 2017, Ramon Ortiz filed a complaint in the Ohio Court of Claims to enforce the request, accusing the city of “sitting on information about the discipline of the officers involved.”

A Christmas DNA Kit and Seven Embryos

At Peiffer Wolf, Sletvold manages the firm’s Ohio offices, and her practice there includes fertility-clinic cases. In February 2022 the firm filed suit in the Summit County Court of Common Pleas for Jeanine and John “Mike” Harvey and their daughter, Jessica Harvey Galloway, against Summa Health System and Dr. Nicholas J. Spirtos. In 1991 the Harveys had gone to Spirtos, then chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Summa Akron City Hospital, for an intrauterine insemination that would use Mike Harvey’s sperm, with the stated goal of a child genetically related to both of them. The insemination took place on August 12, 1991. Jeanine Harvey became pregnant and gave birth to Jessica in 1992.

For Christmas 2020, Jessica’s parents gave her and her husband Ancestry.com kits. The results showed that she was not biologically related to Mike Harvey. Genealogical research led her to her biological father, who confirmed that he and his wife had been Spirtos’s patients at the same time as the Harveys, and a paternity test confirmed that he was her father. “My parents got us Ancestry.com kits as Christmas gifts, and since then, our lives have never been the same,” Jessica said. “Jessica remains our daughter. There is no DNA test that will change that,” Jeanine Harvey said. Mike Harvey said: “It’s like waking up in someone else’s life.”

Sletvold listed what the family wanted to know: “The Harveys placed their trust in Dr. Spirtos. And they want the truth about how this tragedy happened. Did Summa fail to properly clean its laboratory equipment? Was this the result of Summa’s mixing up patients’ sperm samples?” The suit asked the court to order Spirtos and Summa to locate Mike Harvey’s genetic material or account for where it had gone.

In April 2022 the firm filed suit in federal court in Colorado for Kara Seldin-Howell and Kolton Howell against CNY Fertility Colorado and its parent company. They had traveled from Washington state in 2021 to become patients of the Colorado Springs clinic and had gone through months of injections, tests, and an egg-retrieval surgery. The clinic’s doctor performed Kara’s egg retrieval on May 5, 2021. The next day a nurse called to tell the couple they had seven viable embryos. On May 8 the clinic called again. The couple alleged that the clinic’s laboratory staff had failed to put the required oil medium in the Petri dish, that the embryos had dried out and died, and that the doctor told them the clinic was at fault. “Within a span of 48 hours, we went from being overjoyed that our dream of starting a family was finally coming true, to having that dream ripped away from us,” Kolton Howell said. Sletvold said: “CNY Fertility admits that it failed to follow basic lab procedures to safeguard our clients’ embryos and promised to implement a new procedure to ‘double-check’ embryos in the future. In a facility that touts its ‘state-of-the-art embryology lab,’ why was no one ‘double-checking’ in the first place?”

Appointed by Calabrese: Co-Lead Counsel in the Suboxone Film MDL

In February 2024 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the federal Suboxone film cases to Calabrese in Cleveland as MDL No. 3092. The plaintiffs allege that the buprenorphine-naloxone film’s acidic formulation causes dental erosion and decay that ends in severe and permanent tooth damage and loss. On March 8, 2024, after reviewing the applications against the Manual for Complex Litigation’s criteria, Calabrese appointed four co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs: Sletvold, Erin K. Copeland of Houston, Timothy J. Becker of St. Paul, and Trent B. Miracle of Edwardsville, Illinois. The order added a second role for the one co-lead who practiced in Cleveland: “The Court appoints Ms. Sletvold, an attorney resident in this District, to serve as the Court’s Liaison Counsel for this MDL.”

The leadership appointments run a year at a time. Calabrese reappointed Sletvold as co-lead counsel by order of July 2, 2025, and again on July 2, 2026.

The Wellness Center Planned for School Property in East Palestine

When a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine on February 3, 2023, district buses went door to door to evacuate residents and carry them to the schools for emergency shelter, and the schools served as the command center for the disaster response. The schools closed from February 6 to 10, and some students learned virtually for as long as six months, Superintendent James Rook said.

On April 30, 2025, Sletvold and Caroline R. Ford filed suit for the East Palestine City School District Board of Education against Norfolk Southern in federal court in Youngstown. The suit was separate from the consolidated class action over the derailment, in which Sletvold is co-liaison counsel for the plaintiffs. The board alleged that the railroad promised to reimburse its derailment costs, to build a community wellness center on school property, and to relocate and rebuild the athletic facilities on the site Norfolk Southern chose for the center; the general contractor Norfolk Southern engaged estimated the project at over $30,000,000. “This disaster upended our students’ lives,” Rook said when the suit was filed. Norfolk Southern had promised not to walk away, he said. “But Norfolk Southern did walk away from our students.”

Shortly after the derailment, Sletvold said, Norfolk Southern gave the district $300,000. “The CEO specifically characterized that as a down payment on the funds that would ultimately be due to the school district,” she said, adding that he had done so under oath to Congress. “Since the derailment, Norfolk Southern has made over $16 billion in profits,” she said, while its decision to vent and burn the chemicals to reopen its tracks “left the schools facing financial instability.” When Rook described how the railroad had backed away from its commitments, Sletvold supplied the term: “I think the technical legal term you may be searching for there is ghosted you.” A Norfolk Southern spokesperson said the company had reimbursed every invoice the district sent with “proper documentation”; Rook said he had personally given the company all the documentation it requested.

Norfolk Southern moved to dismiss parts of the suit and to strike some of its allegations. It argued that the claims came too late and that its planning did not amount to a binding agreement: the district had no written contract, and the wellness-center discussions had been talks. It admitted that school grounds had been surveyed and that school officials had traveled with railroad executives to see another community center, but called the visit “a field trip.” It argued that the enrollment losses followed a trend, pointing out that about 244 students a year had left through open enrollment in the four years before the derailment, against the 243 the district cited for 2023–2024. And it listed what it had already given: $300,000 for academics, athletics, and extracurricular activities, a $750,000 gift over ten years that the district used to create a public-relations and marketing position, and more than $150,000 for work on the high school track and an elementary school parking lot.

Sletvold answered in public first. The railroad, she said, “continues to say one thing and do another”; in her words, “Norfolk Southern wants to cut corners with the children of this community.” She added: “The Board of Education looks forward to holding Norfolk Southern to its word.”

Her written response, filed July 30, 2025, set out what the railroad had done: Norfolk Southern hired a contractor and an architect, took soil samples, chose the location for the center, asked the district to form a steering committee and invited students’ input, and flew executives from Atlanta to take school officials to other wellness centers built by the same local contractor. “The schools took Norfolk Southern at its word,” she wrote. “They had no reason to suspect Norfolk Southern would not follow through on its promises until it failed to compensate for derailment costs and breached its promise to fund the community center.”

The promises, she argued, had led the schools to hold off on suing within one year, and “to now argue the schools’ claims are time barred would ignore the schools’ reasonable reliance and reward Norfolk Southern for the misrepresentations of its successful PR campaign.” The railroad’s motion, she noted, did not contest the truth of the allegations it asked the court to strike. She tied the district’s losses to the derailment and to the vent-and-burn of five tank cars of vinyl chloride that Norfolk Southern carried out afterward: “Absent those two events, the schools’ property would not be contaminated, perception of the community as contaminated by dangerous chemicals would not exist, fewer students would seek open enrollment in other districts or relocate, and the revenue generated by local taxes the schools depend upon would not be negatively impacted.”

Norfolk Southern’s reply in August said the district had been compensated for any and all damages from the derailment. “To date, substantiation has been a recurring issue,” the railroad wrote. Early in 2026 the board approved a partial settlement worth $750,000. Norfolk Southern agreed to pay $150,000 in a lump sum into the district’s general fund, reimbursing the costs of closing the schools, salaries, transportation, the use of the buildings as emergency-response centers, and emergency housing, and $600,000 in installments to the district’s communications and marketing department, money the district said the railroad had promised after the derailment. The agreement left the district free to pursue its other claims, and on February 12, 2026, the board asked the court to dismiss the federal suit.

Rook called the settlement a first step. “We recognize that these things take time,” he said. The district would keep seeking the money for the community center, first valued at about $30 million, and for the tax revenue it says the derailment cost it: “there are other expenses and lost revenue we are seeking.”