Lawyer asks for release of Youngstown, Ohio tow operator Alex Bugno who is jailed on sex crimes

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — A lawyer this week asked the U.S. Northern District Court of Ohio to order the release of his client who has been jailed on sex crimes.

Rhys Cartwright-Jones filed the motion Monday on behalf of Alex Bugno, 35, of Poland, a former towing company operator who was sentenced in 2020 to 17 years in prison after being convicted of paying two boys to engage in sex acts with him.

Bugno had appealed his convictions to the Seventh District Court of Appeals, which denied his appeal. He then asked the state Supreme Court to hear the case but they declined.

The charges cover activity from February to June 2014.

Cartwright-Jones called the case “an operatic drama of jurisprudential conundrums.”

Cartwright-Jones wrote that two of the four search warrants in the case should have been suppressed by the trial court because of errors in granting and executing the warrants, which violated Bugno’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.

The brief filed by Cartwright-Jones also alleges prosecutorial misconduct and that the trial court erred by allowing certain evidence to be admitted at trial.

The case has been assigned to U.S. Magistrate Judge James E. Grimes Jr.

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