Free Tyrone Noling

Editorial
Justice In Question

Friday, August 18, 2006

Prisons frequently are said to be full of in nocent men - a claim usually made by those with numbers stenciled on their uniforms.

But in the case of inmate Tyrone Noling, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for a double homicide, there's disturbing evidence that the state may be preparing to execute the wrong man. The case of inmate A222599 deserves another official look.

Noling was convicted of killing an elderly Portage County couple on the strength of testimony from two alleged accomplices, who cut deals with prosecutors. Both have since recanted their testimony, claiming to have been coerced and coached by an investigator with the Portage County Prosecutor's Office.

It is not unheard of for crime accomplices to change their stories once they have been safely insulated from the crimes of which they are suspected. But what is even more compelling about the Noling case is the crucial and favorable evidence that the prosecution withheld from the defense that might have vindicated him.

The prosecution, for instance, never told the defense that another man was questioned as a suspect in the murders, refused to take a polygraph and owned a .25-caliber Titan, one of four makes of the gun that could have been used to kill the couple.

Nor did prosecutors share the fact that a search of one of the accomplices' cars failed to turn up the murder weapon that Noling allegedly had used and then stashed in a glove compartment. An accomplice later admitted to lying about the gun. No gun, no hair, no fibers ever connected the chief suspect to the crime. Yet he now sits on death row.

The Noling case appears to be steeped in a web of distortions, unreliable - perhaps coerced - confessions and a public defense team that was unable to uncover the favorable evidence that Plain Dealer reporter Andrea Simakis found in her recent pursuit of this case.

The case is now before U.S. District Judge Donald Nugent, who is to decide shortly whether Noling received a fair trial, or whether the case should be sent back to the trial court. It seems that more than reasonable doubt has been raised, at the very least about the way the prosecution tried this case.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.