Danny Lee Hill deserves death, not new court date

The 30-year miscarriage of justice in the savage rape and murder of a 12-year-old Warren boy shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Three decades ago next month, a three-judge panel in Trumbull County found 19-year-old Danny Lee Hill guilty of aggravated arson, rape, felonious sexual penetration and aggravated murder in the torturous killing of young Raymond Fife of Warren as he rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting in the southwest side of the city. Shortly afterward, the panel sentenced Hill to death.

Today, that court’s clear wishes have yet to be respected. Instead, Hill, now 49, continues to live on Death Row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. His name remains curiously and unconscionably absent among the list of those to be executed in Lucasville now through August 2019.

Making matters worse are renewed efforts by Hill and his defense attorneys to delay Hill’s just and deserved death sentence even longer. A visiting judge may rule any day now on whether the ghoulish cold-blooded murderer and his attorneys should be allowed to request a new trial for his heinous crimes

Last month, Visiting Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove of Summit County conducted a hearing in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court at which attorneys for Hill presented what they deemed as new and credible evidence in the case.

That flimsy evidence consisted of testimony from a so-called “bite mark expert” who argued that part of Hill’s 1986 conviction stemmed from teeth marks on young Raymond’s genitals and that the bite-mark evidence used at Hill’s trial has been deemed unreliable in recent years by the National Academies of Sciences.

Had the bites played a critical role in the death of Raymond, perhaps the added time, anguish and taxpayer expense of a new trial somehow could be justified. Clearly, however, they did not.

Sadistic slaughter

Need we remind Atty. Sarah Kostick of Tucson, Ariz., and Vicki Ruth Adams Werneke of the U.S. Public Defender’s Office in Cleveland, who filed the 400-page execution stall tactic of the incredibly horrid details of Raymond’s sadistic slaughter, of which the bite marks – while certainly grisly and inhuman in and of themselves – did not play a central role in the innocent boy’s death.

Raymond was beaten, brutalized and sodomized with a pipe, set afire and left in the woods to die. He died of heart and lung failure as a result of the injuries he suffered at the hands of Hill and his juvenile accomplice Timothy Combs, including asphyxiation and multiple trauma, according to documented medical evidence.

The Ohio Attorney General’s Office says any suggestion by Hill’s attorneys that they have any newly discovered evidence relating to bite marks is a “gross distortion of the role the bite-mark evidence played at his trial.”

It further added, “No valid claim relating to bite-mark evidence would give the circuit court reason to allow lawyers to be hired to seek a new trial.”

As such, the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office, led by veteran Prosecutor Dennis Watkins, is absolutely correct in labeling the request “nothing more than a poorly contrived side show” and that the so-called new evidence is “completely meritless and unsupported.”

We therefore add our voice to the chorus of those imploring Judge Cosgrove to deny the request for a new trial. Then the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction should act with all due speed to schedule Hill’s long-delayed date with death.

Hill, after all, has been afforded far more than his fair share of appeals, dating back to 1989 when the 11th District Court of Appeals first upheld his conviction. It then stated “evidence of low intelligence and impaired judgment were not significant mitigating factors” to negate capital punishment for the defendant. In appeal after appeal to state and federal courts, Hill played the same mental-deficiency card, but the same conclusion on Hill’s mental acuity and the necessity for the death penalty consistently has been reaffirmed.

As such, let this latest conniving attempt at stonewalling the justice system in Ohio reach its last dead end. Then let the wishes of a Trumbull County court 30 years ago finally reach their intended destination: deserved death by lethal injection for the degenerate Danny Lee Hill.