Local Politics: The sentencing of former CPD officer Nicholas Duty further exposes a broken system

On Tuesday, June 10, former Columbus Division of Police officer Nicholas Duty was sentenced to 36 months in prison by United States District Court Judge Sarah Morrison. Duty pled guilty to two charges of destroying, altering, or falsifying records. 

The first reporting regarding Duty’s crimes described incidents of a police officer destroying or altering body camera footage while “interacting” with two women, including one sexual encounter. During his sentencing process, and through a review of court records performed by the Columbus Dispatch, details of those offenses became more clear. 

Duty worked as a patrol officer on the West Side from January 2019 until he was suspended in March 2024. Court records indicate that Duty engaged in sex for pay within his police vehicle while on duty. Body camera audio indicated that on one occasion he engaged in sex in his vehicle rather than responding to a burglary call. 

The court records also indicated that Duty, who would have been at least 33 years old at the time, made an advance toward a 19-year-old woman who was a victim of domestic abuse during a police response. Duty later texted with her about her abusive boyfriend. The young woman was later killed, allegedly by that boyfriend. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Czerniejewski said that Duty had sex with women while he was on duty multiple times a day, and that the women were extremely traumatized.

If you have been reading some of these descriptions and thinking, “Hey, that’s rape,” you’re absolutely correct. When a police officer solicits sex workers while in uniform, or if they identify themselves as police, they are by definition using coercion every single time. And coercing someone into sex is rape.

In arguing for a shorter sentence, Duty’s attorneys claimed that he was a sex addict for the past 8 years and abused alcohol. If accurate, this would mean that he was a sex addict prior to becoming a Columbus Police officer. It would also mean that his sex addiction failed to raise any disqualifying red flags during the application process, and he then used his position of authority for five years to prey upon women in Columbus. Even though he was caught and prosecuted, he will spend only a maximum of 36 months in prison.

Duty is one in a string of CPD officers who have been charged with crimes related to sexually assaulting sex workers on the West Side, joining Randall Mayhew and former officer Andrew Mitchell. 

Mayhew was charged with soliciting prostitution and dereliction of duty and terminated from the department in 2018. The investigation alleged that he solicited sex workers at least three times during 2015 while on duty on the West Side. He was reinstated in 2019 because an arbitrator decided the city did not have just cause to fire him. One sex worker said in a 2001 interview with the Dispatch that Mayhew never paid her for their sexual encounters, which she said happened every one or two weeks for about a year. She also said Mayhew would tell her that she had a warrant for her arrest and she would go to jail if she didn’t engage in sexual conduct. (Mayhew admitted to having known prostitutes in his patrol vehicle, but denied ever having sexual encounters with them, according to records obtained and reported on by the Dispatch.)

Mitchell was sentenced in May 2024 to 11 years in prison after he pled guilty to two counts of depriving a person of their rights under color of law and one count of obstruction of justice. The “deprivation of rights” involved Mitchell telling sex workers, primarily on the West Side, that they were under arrest, bringing them to a second location, and forcing them to engage in sexual acts. 

Mitchell was not charged with any sex offense, even prior to his plea negotiations. Additionally, when Mitchell was on trial in 2022, charged with murder and involuntary manslaughter for killing Donna Castleberry, jurors were not allowed to hear the accounts of other sex workers who alleged that they had been raped by Mitchell, or to hear that he was facing federal charges for those crimes.

Mayhew is alleged to have solicited sex workers when he was on duty on the West Side in 2015. Mitchell is alleged to have targeted West Side sex workers during his assignment to the now-defunct vice unit from 2017 until he was terminated in 2019. Duty began working patrol on the West Side in 2019 and was not suspended until March 2024. 

Many West Side residents see sex workers and their customers as a blight to be eradicated. I have lived here for nine years and have spoken with many of them. They look to Columbus Police and prosecutors to “solve” the issue by arresting and charging the workers and customers with crimes. But men who use their legal authority to rape sex workers can never improve any issue surrounding sex work. They are exploiting the public’s trust in their position to victimize women, and it is unlikely they would be able to effectively deter sex work or pursue sex traffickers after compromising themselves. How would Duty have been able to arrest someone for trafficking when he had been assaulting the same trafficked women? 

The charges and resulting sentences for these men are certainly influenced by their status as police officers. But they are also influenced by negative attitudes toward sex work. The language used to describe, or in this case, to avoid describing rape, reflects these pernicious attitudes.

Columbus City Council voted in 2021 to implement an ordinance increasing fines and jail sentences for customers of sex workers. Those caught multiple times can now potentially face up to 15 days in jail per offense. Proponents of the change indicated that the prior penalties were not severe enough. CPD Deputy Chief Jennifer Knight pushed for the increased penalties, lamenting the fact that the purchasers of sex “exploit the most vulnerable members of our community without any substantial consequences.” 

If there were substantial consequences for the police officers victimizing Columbus sex workers, Mitchell would have been suspended on Aug. 17, 2018, when CPD first began an investigating him for rape. If that had happened, maybe he wouldn’t have taken Donna Castleberry behind an apartment building on South Yale six days later, parked with the car’s passenger side against the building so she could not get out, and killed her. Substantial consequences for Mayhew would have permanently removed him from a position of power over women in Columbus, rather than simply moving him to a different area of town. 

There are no consequences that can remove the trauma these men caused. But we can prevent more harm in the future by fixing our own ideas about sex workers. A community that respects the value of sex workers’ lives would not put up with their repeated rape and abuse by anyone. It would not permit people who rape sex workers to retain their jobs.