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Hearing’s focus was validity of bite-mark evidence in Danny Lee Hill conviction
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Danny Lee Hill watched via video from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution as two attorneys told Visiting Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove why they thought Hill should get permission to seek a new trial 30 years after he was convicted of brutally killing and raping Raymond Fife, 12, of Warren.
The hearing took place Monday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, where Hill, 48, was convicted of Raymond’s murder and sentenced to death March 5, 1986.
Hill and Timothy Combs were convicted of raping, torturing and burning Raymond in a wooded area along Palmyra Road on Sept. 10, 1985, as Raymond rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting. Raymond died Sept. 12, 1985, from his injuries.
Combs was 17 at the time of the crime and was sentenced to 70 years to life. He will be eligible for his first parole hearing in July 2049. Hill was 18 and remains on death row after a failed attempt several years ago to be ruled too mentally disabled to be executed.
Prosecutor Dennis Watkins and an assistant prosecutor questioned a Cincinnati dentist hired by Hill’s attorneys about the key to Hill’s request for a new trial: the science of bite-mark evidence and how it has changed since 1985, when it was used to help prove Hill participated in the attack.
At the end of the hearing, Judge Cosgrove allowed Watkins 10 days to consider evidence introduced at the hearing without warning Monday – emails and documents – and determine whether he would like another hearing to address that material.
If not, she’ll rule in about 10 calendar days based on the testimony she heard and legal briefs filed earlier, Judge Cosgrove said.
Her decision won’t determine whether Hill gets a new trial; it will determine only whether she will grant Hill’s attorneys the opportunity to formally ask for a new trial.
Atty. Sarah Kostick of Tucson, Ariz., filed a 400-page request in November 2014 in common pleas court here asking to get permission to request a new trial for Hill. She took the case without being paid.
Her argument was that bite-mark evidence used at Hill’s trial had been proved unreliable. A key part of her argument is a report written in March 2014 by Dr. Franklin Wright, a Cincinnati dentist, longtime member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology and an expert in the use of bite-mark evidence in criminal cases.
Wright said he believed the bite marks on Raymond’s body were not made by a human.
Wright testified that “protocols” were instituted in 2013 that were not used in 1985. Watkins asked Wright whether the new protocols meant that the opinions Wright gave regarding bite-mark evidence before 2013 were “wrong,” and Wright answered “No.”
Watkins and LuWayne Annos, an assistant county prosecutor, also questioned Atty. Dennis Terez, U.S. public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, at length as to the way the case ended up with the U.S. public defender’s office instead of the Trumbull County or Ohio offices of the public defender.
Terez said Hill needed his office to handle the bite-mark case – considered by many to be the most-brutal crime in county history – because Hill didn’t trust the county and state public defenders who handled his trial.
But Annos argued the request should have been handled locally, which would have allowed it to be filed according to the deadlines in the law, in four months or by July 2014. Instead, it was filed in eight months, so it should not be allowed, Annos said.
Hill’s attorneys said there were legitimate reasons for the delay, including Hill’s distrust of local and state public defenders and Hill’s limited intellectual ability.
Hill’s attorneys, including U.S. federal public defender Vicki Ruth Adams Werneke, argued the prosecutor’s office could not objectively handle the case because Raymond’s mother, Miriam Fife, worked for the prosecutor’s office 29 years as a victim-witness advocate.