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Appeal denied in YSU fraternity murder case
By joe gorman
youngstown
The 7th District Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld convictions against one of the men charged in a shooting at a Youngstown State University off-campus fraternity party that killed a man and injured 11 others.
The court ruled in a 2-1 vote to deny claims by the lawyers for Columbus Jones that his conviction should be overturned because there was no credible evidence he was the shooter; that one of the charges he was found guilty for should have merged with other counts for purposes of sentencing; and that his due-process rights were violated because photographs of the victims were entered as evidence and that clothing tested for gunshot residue was not proven to be his.
Jones was convicted in August 2012 of murder, 10 counts of felonious assault and discharging a firearm into a habitation. The crimes happened at an off-campus fraternity party Feb. 6, 2011, on Indiana Avenue that killed 25-year-old Jamail Johnson and wounded 10 others.
Appellate Judge Mary DeGenaro dissented from colleagues Judge Joseph Vukovich and Judge Cheryl Waite, saying that she believed the discharging a firearm into a habitation charge was part of the same act of criminal conduct and should have merged with other similar charges at sentencing.
The majority wrote that there was plenty of evidence presented at trial that showed Jones could have been one of the shooters. There was testimony from witnesses who saw Jones point a gun at the back of the house, and another witness saw Jones with a gun after the shooting and another witness saw Jones fire.
The merger argument by Jones’ attorneys was that the charge of discharging a firearm into a habitation was all part of the same crime and was not a separate motive for the shootings. However, the majority of the court ruled Jones had separate motives because he was looking to harm people both inside and outside the home.
As for the photos, the majority wrote that it is in the trial court’s discretion to allow those photos to be shown to a jury and they had some value by showing where wounds entered the body and their effects on the body. The majority also ruled that there was testimony at trial that showed the clothes collected from Jones could be linked to him through testimony of witnesses and other evidence that was collected with it.
In her dissent, Judge DeGenaro writes that during the trial prosecutors told jurors that there was one course of conduct when Johnson was killed and that was a continuous burst of gunfire at the house. She said Jones’ actions were all part of a single course of conduct and that he had only one motive.