Sheriff Richard Jones of ""Butler County, Ohio"":http://www.butlercountyohio.org/index0.cfm, is refusing to evict homeowners or tenants in his jurisdiction who have been foreclosed on and have no other place to live.
The sheriff sent a letter to Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland last week asking him to temporarily halt all forced evictions through the winter months, and Jones has ordered his deputies to ensure that people have shelter or somewhere else to go before they're forced out of their homes and onto the streets in the dead of winter.
According to local ""TV channel WLWT"":http://www.wlwt.com/index.html, Jones said evictions in winter weather and during an economic recession are heartless and such cases should be sent back to the courts and resolved some other way.
""It doesn’t cost much for me to be compassionate, and I’m not going to cause somebody to die because I wasn’t compassionate,"" Jones told the area station out of Cincinnati. ""There has to be some attention drawn to somebody that’s going to be thrown out of their houses that doesn’t have anywhere else to go.""
The sheriff could face court action if a bank challenges his refusal to honor a court-ordered eviction. Jones said though that he would not break the law and would obey any and all court ordered evictions. But instead of focusing on getting people out of houses, he says he's telling his deputies to focus on finding them somewhere else to live.
The ""Butler Country sheriff's office"":http://www.butlersheriff.org/ says its officers have had to evict more than 500 families this year.
Jones joins several other county sheriffs in the United States who have publicly refused to process property eviction orders. Sheriffs in Cook County, Illinois, and Genessee County, Michigan, both recently issued eviction suspensions within their jurisdictions for tenants who were being kicked out of their homes because their landlords fell behind on the mortgage and the properties went into foreclosure.