After 7 years-plus behind bars, killer is given freedom

The shooting occurred
during a fight that
followed a traffic accident.

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — After serving more than seven years of combined jail and prison time, a woman who fatally shot another woman outside a Shehy Street convenience store in May 2000 has been released.

Danielle Kramer, 29, of Austintown, who was serving a voluntary manslaughter sentence in the death of Charise Harmon, 25, of Palmer Street, Campbell, was released from Mahoning County Jail on Tuesday.

The shooting occurred during a fight that followed a traffic accident. Kramer recently had been serving her sentence at the Trumbull Correctional Institution and will be on parole for five years.

Based on erroneous information that Kramer had served only six years and seven months of a seven-year sentence, Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court denied Kramer judicial release at a Tuesday morning hearing.

The judge said Kramer had no prior criminal record, had been a model inmate and showed genuine remorse, but he said releasing her early would demean the seriousness of the offense.

After the hearing, the prosecutor and defense lawyers calculated that she had actually served seven years and 68 days, and the judge acknowledged that revised figure in a judgment entry later in the day.

Court action

After Kramer pleaded guilty in 2001, Judge Krichbaum originally sentenced her to 10 years in prison, denying her request for early release in 2004.

In a resentencing hearing last week, the judge reduced the sentence to seven years. Judge Krichbaum said the resentencing was necessary because the Ohio Supreme Court last year declared provisions of Ohio law he relied on at the original sentencing to be unconstitutional.

“I really just don’t feel that it’s fair for her to even get a chance to come back into society right now,” Brian McClain, who was Harmon’s fiancé, told the judge. “There’s not a day that goes by that my kids don’t cry and ask for their mother,” said McClain, who is the father of two of Harmon’s children. McClain said Harmon was fatally shot in front of her children, who also were present in the courtroom.

“I can’t stand the thought that I had a hand in taking somebody’s life,” Kramer told the judge.