Lawyer opposes motion to reinstate charges

By joe gorman

jgorman@vindy.com

youngstown

A lawyer for a man who had a murder charge dismissed in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court last month is opposing actions by prosecutors to reopen the case.

Anthony Meranto, attorney for Paul Brown, said in a motion filed Friday that Judge Maureen Sweeney should deny their request because prosecutors never called a witness or disputed any testimony at a Sept. 16 hearing about a cellphone that was key to the case.

A hearing on the prosecutor’s request is set for Tuesday.

Brown, 35, was charged in the death of 17-year-old Ashten Jackson, who was killed on the East Side in May 2009. His first trial in January 2012 ended in a mistrial after it was discovered a police report was never turned over to Meranto as part of the discovery process.

Brown also claimed that there was a message on his cellphone the night he was arrested that would have cleared him, but the message could not be retrieved from the phone. A cellphone expert appointed by Judge Sweeney to examine the phone testified that someone switched the card inside the phone with a different one, which rendered the retrieval of messages impossible.

In her entry dismissing the case, Judge Sweeney wrote that when prosecutors collected evidence to try Brown a second time, it was noticed the bag holding the cellphone had a broken seal, and it was sealed back up with tape. Testimony at Brown’s hearing to dismiss the case showed that when evidence is collected, it is put in a locker, and the only person who has the key is the officer assigned to the department’s record room who catalogs and stores evidence.

Police conducted an internal- affairs investigation on how they handled the case, but Police Chief Rod Foley said Friday he did not want to reveal the results of that investigation until the hearing.

In his motion, Meranto said that prosecutors had possession of the evidence for years and never examined the phone, and at the dismissal hearing, they did not call a single witness.

“Laziness is not excusable neglect,” Meranto wrote in his motion.

Brown is in the midst of serving a 71-month federal-prison sentence imposed in November 2009 for being a felon in possession of a firearm.