OHIO SUPREME COURT Man's death sentence for '94 slayings upheld

Defense objections centered on the way the trial court handled jury issues.
By MICHELE C. HLADIK
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
COLUMBUS -- A Youngstown man's conviction and death sentence for the 1994 shooting deaths of two store clerks were upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Mark A. Brown's attorney, John Juhasz, argued earlier this year the conviction should be overturned because of problems with jury deliberations, but the high court unanimously disagreed.
Several of Juhasz's objections centered on the jury and the way the trial court handled jury issues.
During the July oral arguments before the high court, Juhasz argued the jury decision was unreliable because its members were given incomplete instructions, and the judge should have declared the jury deadlocked when it took 11 hours to deliberate in deciding the sentence.
"There is no bright-line test to determine what constitutes an irreconcilably deadlocked jury," Justice Francis Sweeney wrote in the court's decision.
He said that type of decision is at the discretion of the trial court judge, and he pointed out the jury was able to reach a decision during an additional 12-hour deliberation.
"We are unwilling to find that the trial court abused its discretion in finding that the jury was not irreconcilably deadlocked," he said.
Deliberations and arguments
Brown was convicted in the shooting deaths of Hayder Al-Turk and Isam Salman, while they worked as clerks at the Midway Market.
According to court reports, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Salman and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole in 30 years for the murder of Al-Turk.
During oral arguments, Juhasz had also maintained that one of the jurors was not comfortable with the verdict and when polled admitted she had compromised with other jurors and the final decision was not the way she would have voted.
He said a mistrial should have been declared, but the trial judge sent the jury back into deliberations.
But the high court again disagreed with Juhasz.
"The jury may be directed to retire for further deliberations or may be discharged," Sweeney wrote.
He also wrote the juror "willingly went back into deliberations and did not express any further concerns."
"When the verdict was read, [the juror] unequivocally answered that she agreed with the verdict," he said. "Under the circumstances we do not find that the trial court abused its discretion" in the handling of the recanting juror.