Lawyers submit additional arguments for and against new-trial request by Danny Lee Hill

Staff report

WARREN

Lawyers for Danny Lee Hill and the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office have submitted additional documents to visiting Judge Patricia Cosgrove in an effort to influence her on whether Hill should be allowed to request the chance to ask for a new trial.

Judge Cosgrove had a hearing in December in county common pleas court on the matter, but she has not yet ruled. Hill, 48, is on death row for killing Raymond Fife, 12, in 1985 in a wooded area off Palmyra Road Southwest. Timothy Combs also was convicted in the murder, rape and torture of the boy while he was riding his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting. Combs, who was 17 at the time of the murder, won’t be eligible for parole until 2049.

Hill’s attorneys filed a document Tuesday pointing out the Warren-based 11th District Court of Appeals had given triple-murderer James E. Trimble permission to seek a new trial in 2015 based on purported “new evidence.”

Trimble killed his girlfriend, her son and a Kent State University student in 2005 in Kent.

The evidence was related to the possibility a “rogue” police officer entered the student’s apartment during a standoff with police. The suggestion is that his presence could have had a bearing on Trimble’s shooting the student to death.

But Trumbull prosecutors, in their filing, said the Trimble matter is different from the Hill case in that the purported “new evidence” in the Trimble case stems from an attempt in 2012 by a former Portage County deputy to give information about the purported “rogue officer” to law enforcement and attorneys.

The Hill request for a new trial relates to bite-mark evidence used in the Hill trial that Hill’s lawyers now say is unreliable.

But Hill admitted being at the murder scene and watching over Fife while Combs secured lighter fluid used to burn the boy, prosecutors said. The “new” bite-mark evidence in the Hill case isn’t sufficient to suggest a new trial would be warranted, prosecutors said.