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Nathaniel Jackson again asks the Ohio Supreme Court to vacate his death sentence
By Marc Kovac
COLUMBUS
A Trumbull County man facing execution for a 2001 murder of his then-girlfriend’s ex-husband has again asked the Ohio Supreme Court to vacate his death sentence.
It’s the second time justices have reviewed the sentence of Nathaniel Jackson, whose case was remanded by an appeals court for resentencing after it was determined that prosecutors assisted in writing the judge’s original opinion.
According to documents, Jackson and Donna Roberts planned the murder of 57-year-old Robert Fingerhut for months, with an eye toward $550,000 in insurance money. Roberts provided Jackson with access to the Howland home she and Fingerhut shared, where Jackson shot the victim multiple times.
Both Roberts and Jackson received death penalties but later were ordered to be resentenced. Roberts’ death sentence has been vacated twice.
Jackson’s legal counsel has raised numerous issues with the death sentence, urging the state’s high court to again vacate the penalty.
During oral arguments Tuesday, Randall Porter, the public defender representing Jackson, raised concerns about the resentencing hearing, specifically that the judge in the case filed essentially the same opinion in the case.
Porter said the judge was ordered to issue a new opinion, not file a copy of the prior one.
“The second opinion is the exact same as the first opinion,” he said. “There is literally no difference.”
Porter asked justices to remand the case to the trial court for another resentencing, with orders that the resulting entry be newly written and not copied from the early one.
“We’re just asking for a clean opinion, an entirely new opinion, be written ...,” he said.
Justices pressed Porter for further explanation of any defects in the resentencing opinion; Porter said Jackson was focusing Tuesday on the manner in which the opinion was written, not the content.
“I think I understand what you’re up to here,” said Justice Paul Pfeifer. “You want this to go back for a freshly written sentencing opinion by a judge that’s reading a cold record ... but you don’t want to tell us today what’s wrong in the opinion that we have. You want to wait and let the next judge up read the record, re-craft the opinion, and then you want to raise all the issues that you believe are wrong, which could be essentially a re-crafting of the language ... in the next sentencing opinion that we see. We’re inviting you to tell us if there are things wrong. ... Your objective is to delay, delay, delay; isn’t that what the game is here?”
Prosecutors countered that the judge in the case wasn’t ordered to consider new evidence, and the trial court acted properly in resentencing Jackson to death.
Assistant Trumbull County Prosecutor LuWayne Annos said justices earlier found that the original sentencing and death penalty were warranted in the case.