Attorneys for Danny Lee Hill say special prosecutor should handle question of new trial

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Attorneys for convicted murderer Danny Lee Hill say the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office should be replaced with a special prosecutor as Hill’s attorneys ask a visiting judge to grant Hill a new trial.

Hill and Timothy Combs were convicted of the 1985 rape, torture and murder of Raymond Fife, 12, and Hill was sentenced to the death penalty. Combs was a juvenile when the crime occurred.

Hill, 49, remains on death row after a visiting Trumbull County judge denied his request to be ruled mentally retarded/intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. Combs, 47, is serving a life prison sentence.

A motion filed this year in common pleas court says the county prosecutor’s office has a conflict of interest and cannot “review the request for a new trial with any objective lens” because the mother of the murder victim, Miriam Fife, worked for the prosecutor’s office for 29 years as a victim-witness advocate, part of that time as a volunteer.

The prosecutor’s office says the request for a special prosecutor is “nothing more than a poorly contrived side show.” The office says the motion filed by Atty. Sarah Kostick of Tucson, Ariz., and Vicki Ruth Adams Werneke of the U.S. Public Defender’s Office in Cleveland is “completely meritless and unsupported.”

The Ohio Supreme Court appointed Visiting Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove of Summit County in April to preside over a request by Kostick and Werneke for Hill to get a new trial on the grounds that the National Academy of Sciences now says bite-mark evidence used in Hill’s 1985 trial cannot be “validated scientifically.”

A June 2015 reply to the Kostick-Werneke motion filed by the prosecutor’s office says Fife started working as a paid victim-witness advocate in 1989, three years after Hill was convicted of her son’s murder.

Miriam Fife, now retired, has not contributed to the prosecutor’s office’s responses to various appeals by Hill over the years, the filing says.

“This court may rest assured that even if Mrs. Fife openly opposed this defendant’s execution, this office would continue to defend the death sentence imposed because it will forever view the defendant as a violent sexual predator who is a danger to any law-abiding community,” the response says.

Meanwhile, Kostick and Werneke filed a document in the case July 7 that says the prosecutor’s office has another conflict in the case that it learned about in June: Atty. Jim Lewis, who represented Hill during his murder trial in common pleas court in 1985 and 1986, now works for the prosecutor’s office.

Lewis was hired in January 2013 after his retirement from the county office of the Ohio Public Defender.

There has been no indication from Judge Cosgrove when she will rule on the request for new trial or the request to assign a special prosecutor.