Tyrone Noling has been on death row for over 20 years for a crime he did not commit.
In 1996, Mr. Noling was sentenced to death for the murders of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig in rural Portage County, Ohio. Today, he remains on death row in danger of execution despite significant evidence of his innocence:
1. There is absolutely no physical evidence tying Mr. Noling to the murders;
2. All of the principal witnesses against Mr. Noling have recanted their testimony; and
3. Evidence that points to other viable suspects was never heard by the jury at Noling’s trial.
In April 1990, the Hartigs were tragically shot to death in their home in Atwater, Ohio. Neither Mr. Noling’s fingerprints, nor those of his alleged accomplices, were found in the Hartig home, despite uncontroverted evidence that the perpetrator touched many items and ransacked the home. Primitive DNA analysis of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene excluded Mr. Noling and his alleged accomplices. No eyewitnesses placed Mr. Noling or his young friends at the scene of the crime. The lack of evidence led then-Portage County Sherriff Kenneth P. Howe to discard Mr. Noling and the other youths as viable suspects, saying “It just didn’t fit.”
That the boys even became suspects is puzzling. The police had absolutely no physical evidence from the crime scene pointing to any of them. The only thing that the police did have was that in early April 1990, Mr. Noling and his friends were involved in a handful of minor thefts and two bumbling home robberies, including one in which Mr. Noling accidentally discharged a .25 caliber gun. However, ballistics tests conclusively proved this gun was not the Hartig murder weapon. Furthermore, the other robberies took place in another town miles away, and they were strikingly different in nature from the cold-blooded murders of the Hartigs.
Statements of the three young witnesses were obtained by an investigator with the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office and used to build a case against Mr. Noling. However, evidence developed since trial indicates that the statements of these witnesses were produced through coercive interrogation tactics and possess indicia of false confession. Experts have found that these statements “should be classified as unreliable.” [http://bit.ly/1rag5Fw] [http://bit.ly/23GZdHr]. Furthermore, all of the principal witnesses against Mr. Noling have recanted their testimony since trial.
Mr. Noling’s jury was deprived of significant and compelling information that pointed to other suspects in the Hartig murders.
Notably, the foster brother of Dan Wilson told investigators that his brother had killed the Hartigs. Dan Wilson lived roughly a mile from the Hartigs home. As a youth, Wilson was convicted of a home invasion robbery that resulted in the death of his elderly victim. In 1991, just a year after the Hartig murders, Mr. Wilson murdered a young woman in Elyria, Ohio and was executed on June 3, 2009 for this crime.
In an affidavit obtained by Mr. Noling’s counsel upon discovery of the undisclosed police notes, Mr. Wilson’s foster brother affirmed his statement to the police implicating Wilson in the Hartig murders. Mr. Wilson’s foster brother also stated that Wilson was committing thefts and breaking into homes at the time of the Hartig murders, and that he drove a blue Dodge Omni. After the Hartig murders, witness Jim Geib told authorities that on the day of the Hartig murders he saw a dark blue, midsize car leaving “that general location [of the Hartig home]” at around 4:30 p.m.
Since trial, Mr. Noling also discovered evidence that blood-typing evidence at the time of trial failed to exclude Dan Wilson as the source of genetic material left on a cigarette butt – the only piece of physical evidence discovered at the Hartig crime scene. This same type of testing, however, did exclude Mr. Noling and his three co-defendants. While the prosecution disclosed Mr. Noling’s results to counsel, the prosecution withheld both the fact that they tested Mr. Wilson and the results of Mr. Wilson’s tests.