Ohio Supreme Court to hear death row inmate's appeal that Ohio's DNA testing laws violate his rights
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a death row inmate's appeal that argues state laws on DNA testing unfairly discriminate against capital defendants.
Tyrone Noling, who maintains he is innocent, wants access to more DNA testing than a trial court in Portage County allowed. Noling, 43, is challenging Ohio law that blocks defendants in capital cases from appealing a trial judge's decision on post-conviction DNA decisions to an appellate court. For lesser crimes, the state allows that appellate process on DNA decisions.
If Noling wins his appeal the impact could be much broader than just his case, perhaps affecting all future capital punishment cases. Defendants would have a route of appeal that now is not at their disposal.
Noling was convicted in 1996 of shooting Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig to death. Their bodies were found six years before on the floor of the kitchen in their Atwater Township home.
Although the home was ransacked, no evidence linking Noling or his alleged accomplices was found at the scene. DNA analysis on a cigarette butt that was found there excluded Noling and his accomplices.
No witnesses placed Noling or his friends at the scene of the crime. Key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and recently discovered forensic and witness evidence points to another suspect.
Noling has exhausted nearly all of his appeal options at this point, but this case could lead to more testing of DNA evidence that could perhaps exonerate him, said Carrie Wood, a lawyer with the Ohio Public Defender's office.
"Ohio must do everything in its power to be sure it does not execute an innocent man," Wood said. "The gaps in Ohio's appeals process must be fixed. ... Giving individuals whose lives are at stake less court review is nonsensical as well as patently unconstitutional."
Under Ohio law, when a defendant in a non-capital case seeks post-conviction DNA testing and the trial judge denies that request, that defendant can appeal the trial judge's decision through the courts of appeals and the state Supreme Court.
But Ohio law doesn't allow that appellate process for cases involving defendants convicted of capital crimes, Wood said. Those appeals are only available at the discretion of the Supreme Court, and the court accepts a small percentage of those cases.
That violates protections guaranteed under the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, his lawyers argued in a brief.
Noling's appeal centers on the handling of post conviction DNA testing in 2010. In that request his lawyers argued that a potential suspect in the crime had been identified and that DNA testing -- more sophisticated than what was available two nearly two decades before -- could conclusively link that suspect to the cigarette butt from the crime scene and to the murders.
Noling's defense team argues he is entitled to all the results of that testing, that more extensive testing on shell casings found at the scene-- including a check against a federal database -- should be done and that there should be a more thorough record on the selection of the testing lab and the testing process that lab follows.
"Mr. Noling is an innocent man who has been on death row for almost 20 years," Wood said. "As the Ohio Supreme Court determined in accepting jurisdiction, Mr. Noling's case is one of great public importance and involves a substantial constitutional question."
Noling, meanwhile, remains incarcerated on Ohio's death row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.
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