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Murder defendant asks for judge to step down
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Lawyers for a man accused of a 2010 murder during a robbery at a South Side store asked the 7th District Court of Appeals Thursday to bar the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court from hearing the case.
Atty. David Betras filed the motion just days before trial is to begin for Frankie Hudson Jr., 23, of Falls Avenue.
Hudson is scheduled to go to trial Monday for the Dec. 14, 2010, death of Christopher Weston, 44, who was killed at a market on Overland Avenue where Weston was working.
Betras’ motion says that Judge Maureen Sweeney should be prohibited from hearing the case because at the time the crime Hudson is accused of committing took place, he was a juvenile, and instead, the case should be heard in juvenile court.
The motion says that Judge Sweeney agreed in November to a request by prosecutors to dismiss the case because prosecutors did not indict the case first in the juvenile court system. She dismissed the case, and then Hudson was reindicted.
Hudson was not indicted in Weston’s death until 2013, when he was 20 years old. Betras said that because of Hudson’s age at the time the crime was committed, the juvenile court should have held jurisdiction over the case instead of the common pleas court.
Betras also said that under Ohio law, once a criminal case is dismissed, like Hudson’s was, it is “terminated.”
Betras, appointed by the court to represent Hudson, won him a not-guilty verdict last June in a murder trial and also represented Hudson on charges that he belonged to a criminal gang – charges for which Hudson now is serving a prison sentence.
Prosecutors issued a superseding indictment in the case July 13, charging Hudson with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of intimidation of a witness. Prosecutors will not go into detail on the new charges, saying only that Hudson tried to arrange to have a witness in the case killed.
The appeals court has not set a hearing date on the motion.
Assistant Prosecutor Martin Desmond, lead prosecutor on the case, said the issues Betras brought up already have been addressed by the court, and he is confident that all the procedures were followed properly in the case.