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Ariz. attorney asks Trumbull judge to consider new trial for murderer Danny Lee Hill
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
An Arizona attorney has asked a Trumbull County judge to give a new trial to convicted murderer Danny Lee Hill of Warren on the grounds that bite evidence used at Hill’s murder trial nearly 30 years ago has been discredited.
Hill was sent to death row in 1986 for killing 12-year-old Raymond Fife of Warren. Hill more recently challenged his death sentence by saying he was mentally retarded, but a visiting judge denied that claim.
Atty. Sarah R. Kostick of Tucson filed a motion last week with Judge Andrew Logan of Common Pleas Court seeking permission to ask for a new trial.
The county prosecutor’s office says it will be filing a response to the request in the coming days.
Miriam Fife, mother of Raymond Fife and a victim-witness advocate for Trumbull County, expressed frustration that defendants and their attorneys are allowed to raise one issue after another to delay execution.
“It’s just a stall tactic,” Fife said.
Kostick said she previously worked as an “extern” for the federal public defender’s office for Northern Ohio. That office tried two times but failed earlier this year to convince a federal judge to appoint the public defender’s office to represent Hill in his request for a new trial. Kostick says she is representing Hill pro-bono, meaning for free.
In her filing, Kostick asked Judge Logan to seek a visiting judge to decide whether to consider a new trial.
Hill, 47, was convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to death in the 1985 torture and mutilation killing of Raymond Fife in a wooded area off Palmyra Road Southwest. Hill was 18 at the time, and co-defendant Tim Combs was 17. As a juvenile, Combs was not eligible for the death penalty and got a life prison sentence.
Kostick wrote in her filing that Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins relied heavily during Hill’s trial on testimony relating to bite marks on the genitals of Raymond Fife.
Some of the evidence came from Dr. Curtis Mertz, a forensic dentist, who compared the marks with dental impressions from the teeth of Hill and Combs and concluded that the marks had come from Hill.
But a federal public defender secured a report early in 2014 by Dr. Franklin Wright, a Cincinnati dentist who said the marks were not made by a human.
Kostick wrote that an effort to get a new trial for Hill began after the National Academies of Sciences in recent years “released a report determining that bite mark evidence is unreliable and cannot be validated scientifically.”
The Ohio Attorney General’s Office argued last spring that Hill’s attorneys were overstating how important bite mark evidence was in Hill’s conviction.