The Plain Dealer
Death Row Inmate Denied Second Trial
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Andrea Simakis
Plain Dealer Reporter
Death row inmate Tyrone Noling won't get a new trial, a Portage County Common Pleas judge ruled.
Judge John Enlow wrote that evidence uncovered by The Plain Dealer that raised doubts about Noling's conviction did not meet the standards for granting a second trial. The judge also wrote that Noling's lawyers should have presented it sooner, even though the courts have barred Noling from seeing that evidence for more than a decade.
Noling, convicted in 1996 of the murders of Cora and Bearnhardt Hartig, has always said he did not kill the elderly Atwater Township couple.
Since a jury sentenced him to death, he has asked state and federal judges to allow him access to the Portage County prosecutor's files and each time, he has been told no.
Last year, The Plain Dealer filed a public records request with the prosecutor and received hundreds of pages of information, including crime scene reports, psychological evaluations, handwritten notes and transcribed interviews that Noling's lawyer, Ohio Public Defender Kelly Culshaw, had never seen. Records showed key witnesses for the prosecution drastically changed their stories from interview to interview, in some cases telling the grand jury one thing, the trial court another.
Culshaw told the court in January that her client had been robbed of his right to a fair trial.
"Inconsistency after inconsistency, lie after lie," Culshaw told Enlow. "The only way to fix the mistakes in this case is to give Mr. Noling a new trial.
Jurors never heard that police questioned two other suspects soon after the killings in 1990. The first, who matched the description of a man seen in the Hartigs' neighborhood the day of the murders, initially said he didn't know the couple, then admitted he had sold them insurance and had been in their home. The other suspect once owned a .25-caliber Titan handgun, a brand that experts say was one of only four that could have been used to kill the Hartigs.
Noling's trial attorneys had that information, but didn't use it nor did they pass along all the evidence to Noling's new lawyer when the trial was over, Culshaw said.
Enlow did not elaborate on why he found the evidence lacking, but sided with prosecutors who argued that Noling's claims were not new and had been rejected by other courts.
Culshaw said she plans to appeal Enlow's decision. Another appeal is pending in U.S. District Court.
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