Louis Mann would spend rest of his life behind bars

Judge cannot choose death option at Nov. 26 sentencing

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Four jurors felt strongly that Louis Mann’s life should be spared.

“We knew that we were never going to change their mind. There was no reason to drag it out,” one juror said shortly after the panel recommended life in prison with no parole.

The jury deliberated three hours before giving its verdict to Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court Monday afternoon.

Judge McKay will sentence Mann, 33, at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 26. He can choose a lesser penalty of life in prison with parole eligibility after 25 years or 30 years, but he cannot choose the death option.

“I think you have to take everything into account, and you don’t want to make a decision for death unless you’re completely sure of it,” another juror said.

The juror added that watching Louis Mann and listening to his unsworn statement on Friday made the juror feel Mann was remorseful for killing his parents two years ago, even though he was not good at expressing it.

“I felt there was remorse that didn’t show,” the juror said, adding that Mann freely admitted to the murders.

A niece of Phillip Mann, 59, and Frances Mann, 53, the murder victims, said she was unhappy about the way her aunt and uncle were portrayed during the trial.

“The jury did what it was supposed to do, but they didn’t get the whole story,” said Shelley Tuttle of North Carolina, who moved from Champion in 1991. She was a babysitter for Louis when he was a child.

“You don’t know what happens behind closed doors, but we didn’t know any of that happened,” she said of claims that Frances Mann was unloving toward Louis or that his father sexually abused him.

“Fran was not that type of person,” Tuttle said, explaining that remarks her aunt made about wishing she had a daughter instead of a son were nothing more than a family joke. “There was a lot of love in that house. They gave him everything.”

Tuttle said she and several family members wish Louis had gotten the death penalty, even if it just meant he had to live in a cell 23 hours per day as a death-row inmate instead of in general prison population.

“He’s never apologized to anybody,” she said.

Phillip Mann Jr., Louis Mann’s half brother, who testified as a rebuttal witness to testimony that negatively portrayed Frances and Phillip Mann Sr., said of the verdict, “Justice has been served.”

Chris Becker, assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, said he was satisfied with the verdict, saying: “Suffice it to say, he’ll die in prison. We felt this was the type of case that had to go to the jury.”

In closing arguments earlier Monday, Atty. Gregory Meyers from Columbus, one of Mann’s attorneys, said the United States “used to be eye-for-an-eye,” but “you don’t have to choose death. Please don’t.”

Becker, meanwhile, said all the mitigation evidence defense lawyers presented to try to save Mann’s life came from Mann himself, and “he’ll say anything, I mean anything, to get out of trouble.”

That same jury convicted Mann a week ago of killing his parents in their Jefferson Street Southwest home two years ago.

Meyers said the reason Louis Mann became a drug abuser at a young age, experienced depression, tried to commit suicide and went to the hospital several times for psychiatric treatment was because of abuse from his parents.

“There were shadows, there were dark shadows in that household. Abuse, emotional abuse, the cold-hearted nature of the mom, the sex abuse by the dad,” Meyers said.

“I don’t step on the graves of the dead,” he said. But he added, “I do not shy though from the fact that the history and record teaches that something was wrong in that family, long before Sept. 30 of 2011,” Meyers said of the day of the murders.

Meyers described what an Ohio execution looks like, having witnessed several.

“They spread the man’s arms and they put the needle in the vein. That is the power of the pen. The government has no right to do that unless all 12 of you sign that piece of paper,” he said of jurors.

Becker reminded jurors they had all agreed in jury selection they would be willing to sentence Mann to death if it met the requirements of the law.