Editorial: Is probation enough for sheriff's department guilty pleas?

The Westmoreland County Sheriff’s Department under former leadership had a problem.

It was a legal problem — namely that a number of its employees were not merely serving documents or escorting prisoners. No, they were facing charges themselves.

It started at the top, with then-Sheriff Jonathan Held, who was investigated by the state Attorney General’s Office and charged with corruption.

It trickled down to other officers and deputies. Held’s second- and third-in-command both faced their own charges. Around the same time Held was losing his reelection race to successor James Albert, two other deputies were being charged. Bobby Neiderhiser, 41, of Mt. Pleasant was charged with corruption of minors after police said he texted with a 15-year-old girl to pursue sex with her and another minor. Meanwhile, Daniel Aaron Gradischek, 34, of Unity faced five criminal counts for leveraging his position as a deputy sheriff against female inmates for sexual purposes.

Held’s charges ended in a mistrial in 2018 and a planned retrial slogged slowly forward, delayed first by the reelection and then treading water like many other cases in 2020 and 2021. On Thursday, Held finally entered a guilty plea to one misdemeanor theft charge after years of denying the charges that he forced department employees to work on his campaign on county time.

On Friday, Gradischek pleaded to one count each of felony institutional sexual assault and misdemeanor official oppression. Neiderhiser pleaded to his charges in March 2020.

Aside from all working for the Sheriff’s Department, the three have something else in common. All received probation sentences. Neiderhiser’s ended March 2. Held will serve his in Florida, where he has relocated.

While all three have faced nonlegal consequences for their actions, not the least of which was losing the jobs they betrayed, those may be the most serious penalties, as even the judges seemed to acknowledge.

“You are a low risk to re-offend and cooperated with law enforcement when you made admissions to conduct police weren’t even aware of at the time,” Westmoreland County Judge Meagan Bilik-DeFazio said in Gradischek’s sentencing after prosecutors asked for a short sentence.

“You’ve already paid a price for this crime, in the prior trial particularly. That penalty was already served and suffered by you,” Judge Timothy Creany told Held.

Taken individually, these are compassionate words to first-time offenders. But taken together, they make one wonder whether being sentenced to go forth and sin no more is enough of a punishment for not just committing crimes and violating public trust, but being part of a law enforcement department that had a serious problem following the law.