Panel reverses death sentence for Herring

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

A three-judge panel of the 7th District Court of Appeals has unanimously reversed the death sentence for Willie S. Herring in the April 30, 1996, shooting deaths of three people in a robbery at the Newport Inn.

The panel ruled Friday that Judge John M. Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court must conduct a new sentencing hearing, in which “a jury shall be impaneled to consider whether to once again impose the death penalty or to instead impose life in prison.”

Herman Naze, Jimmie Lee Jones and Dennis Kotheimer died of their injuries, and two others were wounded in the gunfire after Herring and four other armed men burst into the Indianola Avenue bar on the city’s South Side.

The panel ruled the death sentence must be reconsidered because Herring’s trial defense lawyers, Gary Van Brocklin and Thomas E. Zena, failed to fully investigate information about Herring’s troubled childhood, lack of positive role models, substance abuse, depression, low IQ and possible organic brain impairment, which they could have presented to the jury in the trial’s penalty phase.

“In a situation where the death penalty is to be considered, a deficient mitigation investigation is cause for grave concern,” wrote appellate Judge Gene Donofrio, with Judge Joseph J. Vukovich and Cheryl L. Waite concurring in the judgment.