Former Dayton Children’s doctor given jail sentence, probation on child endangering charges

XENIA — Correction: An earlier headline on this story said Gregory Ramey was sentenced to prison. This is incorrect. Ramey was sentenced to jail.

A former Dayton Children’s Hospital doctor was sentenced to some jail time and probation Thursday to charges including endangering children and tampering with evidence.

>>PREVIOUS REPORT: Over 100 child porn charges dropped after former Children’s Hospital doctor pleads guilty

Gregory Ramey, 71, of Columbus, pleaded guilty in September to six counts of endangering children and a single count of tampering with evidence as part of a plea deal.

On Thursday, Ramey was sentenced to six months in a community correctional lockdown facility, six months in a county jail, intensive probation supervision for five years, a mental health evaluation, and sex offender treatment.

The two jail terms will be served consecutively. Ramey was also fined $30,000.

Ramey was initially charged with 151 felony counts, including 145 child pornography charges. However a plea deal filed in Greene County court in September saw the child pornography charges dropped in exchange for Ramey pleading guilty to six counts of endangering children and a single count of tampering with evidence.

>>RELATED: Former Dayton Children’s doctor charged with 145 felonies pleads not guilty, will bond out of jail

Ramey could have faced up to 21 years in prison and a $70,000 fine, however there is no mandatory prison term for any of the charges he was convicted on, court records show.

The Ohio Attorney General’s Office handled the prosecution in the case and Attorney General Dave Yost spoke with News Center 7′s John Bedell ahead of the sentencing. Yost said a destroyed computer hard drive and the legal interpretation of what constitutes child pornography led to the prosecution dropping the child porn charges in the plea deal.

“So there’s a very technical definition of what constitutes child pornography. I think if most people looked at these pictures, they would go, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting. That’s child pornography.’ But that doesn’t mean that we can prove by proof beyond a reasonable doubt that it meets that legal definition,” Yost said.

And with the destroyed evidence, Yost said the prosecution’s goal became to make sure Ramey was away from kids.

“And in fact, this defendant destroyed the hard drive that we were looking for where we believe there were many more images available. So we had to accept what were are able to meet our burden of proof on. And the key is, he’s pleading guilty to felonies and he’s not going to be around kids anymore. That was my goal.”

Greene County Common Pleas Court Judge Adolfo Tornichio spoke directly to Ramey before announcing his decision on the sentence.

“These children are victims. And your actions contributed to their victimization,” Tornichio said during Thursday’s hearing.

“Although the facts bear that the Children’s Hospital computer that was assigned to you was not used in this crime, children you had treated or come into contact with were not part of this crime, but somebody’s little girl or somebody’s little boy was involved in your crime,” Tornichio said.

Tornichio detailed a timeline of the investigation into Ramey showing his movements after his AOL email account was frozen due to the criminal investigation in 2019.

“On July 28, 2019, the internet crimes against children task force opened an investigation on you. As a result of that investigation, they discovered that you had an email account with AOL. On the next day, July 29, 2019 law enforcement reached out to AOL to have them preserve their account. AOL froze your email address. And upon your discovery that your email account was frozen, on July 30, 2019, a new computer was purchased by you at Best Buy,” Tornichio said.

“Now we don’t know if that CPU is destroyed, hidden, or what. But you knew your house of cards was about to fall. And rather what you do in the privacy of your home should come to light, that computer was gone because you knew what you were doing was wrong.”

Ramey’s defense attorney argued for a community control sentence saying the images were not illegal and “not criminal in nature.”

“The vast number of these images were not child pornography in any sense of the imagination,” attorney Jon Paul Rion said.

Rion reiterated that the case had nothing to do with Dayton Children’s Hospital and did not involve Ramey abusing his position of trust and authority.

Ramey is a former Dayton Children’s Hospital child psychologist and the hospital said “we were blindsided by the allegations of inappropriate behavior in his personal life. Nothing in the performance of his professional role created any suspicions.”

“We are shocked and deeply troubled by these allegations, which are in stark contrast to our mission and core values,” Dayton Children’s said in a statement.

Ramey started at Dayton Children’s in 1979. The well-known pediatric psychologist was one of the public faces of Dayton Children’s, writing a weekly parenting column in the Dayton Daily News that was distributed on the New York Times wire service, and making frequent appearances in local and outside media.

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