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Jury selection begins in 2009 murder case
YOUNGSTOWN
Jury selection was completed Monday for the trial of Paul Brown for the May 2009 murder of 17-year-old Ashten Jackson.
The jury viewed a crime scene related to the case on Wardle Avenue on the city’s East Side late Monday and is scheduled to hear opening statements from prosecution and defense lawyers at 10 a.m. today.
It was the beginning of yet another chapter in the convoluted six-year history of the case, which is before Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
The prosecution contends Brown, 37, of Falls Avenue, and another man picked up Jackson on the night of May 25, 2009, hoping Jackson would help Brown commit a robbery.
Police arrested Brown on a weapons charge shortly after Jackson went missing.
The gun he was carrying is the one Jackson had taken from his residence on May 25, 2009, prosecutors say.
Jackson, who had been shot four times, was found dead in a field on the city’s East Side on May 30, 2009.
At the request of the defense, Judge Sweeney declared a mistrial in January 2012 because police had not turned over all the evidence to the prosecution and defense.
In April 2013, before a jury was assembled, the trial was again postponed when Judge Sweeney ordered production of records concerning Brown’s cellular phone.
The defense sought dismissal of the case on the grounds that Brown’s cellphone had been tampered with.
Brown’s lawyer, Anthony Meranto, said Brown had told police another man had left a message on his cellphone admitting the murder.
After evidentiary hearings, Judge Sweeney dismissed the murder charge, but later reinstated it.
Finding that Brown had not told police about the message left on his cellphone, a three-judge panel of the 7th District Court of Appeals unanimously upheld reinstatement of the murder charge against Brown.
“Without that statement, there is no support for a contention that exculpatory or useful evidence was destroyed,” the appeals court ruled Dec. 29, 2014.
The appeals court ruling said Jackson had been shot with the gun police recovered from Brown during his arrest.
Judge Sweeney sustained Monday a prosecution motion to exclude the personnel file of Youngstown Police Officer John Kelty from evidence.
Kelty was demoted from lieutenant to patrolman for his actions in a fixed driving-under-the-influence case last year.