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Lawyer asks to dismiss murder charge against Brown
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
The lawyer for a man who was to go on trial in a 2009 murder Monday said in a motion filed in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court he found more evidence he was never given.
Paul Brown, 37, has had two previous trials halted because of evidence he did not receive from prosecutors.
In a motion to dismiss filed before Judge Maureen Sweeney, Atty. Anthony Meranto said after a meeting with police and prosecutors in June, after the second mistrial was declared in Brown’s case, he found a letter Brown had written and two more by an important witness that were never given to him.
Jury selection was to begin Monday in Brown’s trial. He is charged with murder in the death of Ashten Jackson, 17, in May 2009.
On June 17, after a day of testimony, a mistrial was declared when prosecutors played a video of a police interview with a witness Meranto said was never given to him and was never mentioned in the case file. He asked for a dismissal then but was denied.
In January 2012, a mistrial was declared because a statement from Jackson’s mother used in trial was never given to Meranto during the discovery process, in which information is shared by the state and defense in preparation for trial.
Judge Sweeney declared a mistrial then because the trial already had started.
In 2013, the judge dismissed the charge against Brown briefly when Meranto claimed police tampered with a cellphone Brown had. After an investigation by the police department’s Internal Affairs Division and prosecutors, however, they proved the phone in question was a different one than Brown had and the charge was reinstated.
Meranto claims in his latest motion, which was filed July 13, that trying Brown again would violate his rights under the constitution against double jeopardy.
In a response prosecutors filed Monday, they said a mistrial does not bar the state from trying a defendant again unless there was intentional deception on the part of the state.
They said in their motion that Meranto was ordered by Judge Sweeney to go through the case file in 2012. The letters he refers to in his motion were there the entire time.