Ohio Supreme Court orders new sentencing for death row inmate
(Reuters) - A man who beat a female neighbor to death with a baseball bat when he was a teenager had a troubled family background and childhood of drug and alcohol abuse and should not have been sentenced to death, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.
The court in a 4-3 decision vacated the death sentence of Rayshawn Johnson, who was 19 years old when he killed Shanon Marks in 1997 in a Cincinnati neighborhood. Hamilton County prosecutors are reviewing options for a resentencing that cannot include the death penalty, a spokeswoman said.
"The sentence of death imposed by the trial court is not appropriate in this case," Justice Paul Pfeifer wrote for the majority.
Johnson had been sentenced to death twice in the killing, most recently in 2012 after a federal court set aside the initial sentence, ruling that jurors should have been allowed to consider his difficult childhood at a sentencing hearing.
“I think the message is that courts need to give meaningful consideration to the mitigation that is presented on behalf of clients. His life story, all of those things, the negative influences… the significant trauma … comes back later in life in unfortunate ways,” said Ohio Public Defender Timothy Young, whose office represents Johnson.
Johnson confessed to entering Marks' house wearing gloves and carrying a baseball bat shortly after her husband left for work, hitting her repeatedly with the bat and taking about $50, according to court records.
"What's kind of mindboggling about this decision is that - I have to be careful because we have rules not to criticize judges so I'm not going to do that. But what is frustrating, and this poor family, my god, we went through basically two trials already," Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney Joseph Deters told reporters.
(Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago; Editing by Andrew Hay)
