An attorney suspended for a bizarre prank involving a Pringles can filled with human feces has been reinstated.
Jack Blakeslee, a criminal defense lawyer from Nobel County, was caught on surveillance video in November 2021 leaving the can in the parking lot of a crime victim advocacy center. The Ohio Supreme Court suspended Blakeslee for a year in November 2023, with six months stayed, citing conduct that adversely reflected his fitness to practice law.
According to Court News Ohio, Blakeslee selected the Haven of Hope parking lot for his prank, targeting victim advocates he knew and would likely encounter in court shortly after leaving the can. The court stated that sanctioning Blakeslee was necessary to protect the public.
The court’s decision noted, “Despite societal standards of cleanliness and decorum, Blakeslee failed to control his own bizarre impulses to place feces-filled cans out in public for unsuspecting people to find. His aberrant conduct has adversely reflected on his own fitness to practice law and brought discredit to the profession through significant media attention.”
Blakeslee, who has been a lawyer since 1976, admitted to The Columbus Dispatch that he did not target anyone specifically and had pulled the same prank at least ten times that year. He was representing a defendant in a capital murder case at the time of the incident.
On Tuesday, the court announced that Blakeslee had fulfilled his disciplinary conditions and committed no further misconduct, leading to the reinstatement of his law license.
Blakeslee’s reinstatement comes just weeks after an acting state supreme court judge in Buffalo, New York, learned he would not be reappointed after police body cameras recorded him shoving a cop in a brawl over a parking spot.