Visiting judge to hear Hill’s latest motion | News, Sports, Jobs – Warren Tribune Chronicle
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WARREN — A visiting judge who heard a convicted murderer’s bid for relief from the death penalty over bite-mark evidence gets a second chance at the case, this time determining the merits of defense claims that Danny Lee Hill is mentally and intellectually disabled and thus constitutionally prohibited from facing the death penalty.
Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove, a retired Summit County jurist who was assigned the Hill case about a half-dozen years ago to hear the bite-mark appeal, has scheduled a hearing by Zoom at 10 a.m. Nov. 10 to hear several motions on reconsideration of Hill’s Atkins vs. Virginia mental disability claim and whether prosecutors can have a say in Hill’s representation in the case.
In Cosgrove’s order, she notes that the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals had granted the request of three attorneys who had worked Hill’s case at the federal level to assist counsel litigating the intellectual disability claim in state court. On Nov. 10, Cosgrove will rule if attorney Matthew Gay can appear as counsel or co-counsel in the state case despite objections from the prosecution.
Cosgrove also will rule if she wants to hear testimony on Hill’s intellectual disability claim, which already had been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hill is scheduled to be injected lethally on July 22, 2026, after being convicted by a three judge panel in the September 1985 torture-killing of 12-year-old Raymond Fife in a field in southwest Warren. He has been appealing the conviction for more than 36 years.
Hill was 19 at the time of the rape and murder, among other crimes committed upon the boy. It has been argued Hill had diminished mental capacity and was barely literate. Another defendant, Timothy Combs, a juvenile at the time, was ineligible for the death penalty and died in prison in 2018 while serving multiple life sentences.
NEW FILING
Meanwhile on Friday, prosecutors headed by Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins, assistant Charles Morrow and special assistant Stephen F. Maher of the Ohio Attorney General’s office, filed a court brief stating that crime victim Miriam Fife, Raymond’s mother, has a constitutional right to intervene in this court matter.
The motion asks that Miriam Fife be allowed to intervene to assert her right established by Ohio voters in 2017, which by 83 percent approved Marcy’s Law, which accords certain fundamental rights to crime victims.
In the 11-page document, the prosecutors claim that Miriam Fife has been deprived of her rights because of “unreasonable delay” in the Hill case. They call for a “prompt conclusion of the case.”
“It is these constitutional rights, the victim, Miriam Fife, is seeking to protect and assert by requesting… Watkins to file this instant motion, in her behalf, seeking to intervene in Hill’s unsubstantiated attempt to re-litigate his Atkins claim.”
Defense attorneys will have a few days to answer this brief.
In talking about Miriam Fife, the document states she became a victim advocate for the county prosecutor’s office, “working tirelessly, assisting other families of homicide victims as well as other victims, creating the Trumbull County Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children in 1987.”
In the document, Watkins states Miriam Fife knows from her experience in the courtrooms that the legal process can be complex and lengthy. But Watkins wrote that this journey to see justice done in her son’s murder case “has become an unending nightmare for her and her family.”
Throughout this document, Watkins ticks off the years of litigation and different legal proceedings that had continued to mount through the decades while the “proof of (defendant’s) guilt never changes.”
“This is precisely why victims of crime, like Miriam, deserve to have her rights ‘protected in a manner no less vigorously than the rights afforded the accused’ to ensure ‘a prompt conclusion’ to her case as the Ohio Constitution now provides,” the document states.
Watkins has called the recent mentally disability and bite-mark claims as “stalling tactics” on the part of defense attorneys for Hill.
“Enough is enough,” Miriam Fife has said about whether she will see this case conclude. “I am 82 years old, and I’m not going to live forever.”
In November 2014, Hill’s lawyers moved the state court to hold hearings upon new evidence that the bite-mark identification used at the original trial was invalid. Cosgrove was assigned to hear testimony in the case because at the time, Fife’s mother Miriam was an employee of the prosecutor’s office. During the hearings, a forensic odontologist concluded and Cosgrove concurred that Fife’s injury was not a human bite mark.
When making her decision after the proceedings, Judge Cosgrove concluded the bite-mark evidence was only one of many factors in determining whether Hill was a principal offender of Fife’s rape. Cosgrove said even if the bite-mark evidence was thrown out, the outcome of the trial would have been the same.
Federal public defenders have now taking their arguments about new bite-mark evidence in the Hill case to the Sixth Circuit federal appellate court.