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Judge: Killer Danny Lee Hill can ask for new trial
danny lee hill case
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The drawn-out legal proceedings surrounding Danny Lee Hill, the former Warren man convicted of the brutal murder and rape of Raymond Fife, 12, in 1985, will be getting longer.
A visiting judge ruled Tuesday that she will allow attorneys for Hill, 48, to ask for a new trial based on bite-mark evidence used at Hill’s 1986 trial that his attorneys believe is no longer credible.
Hill is on death row for killing Fife in a wooded area off Palmyra Road Southwest. Hill’s co-defendant, Timothy Combs, also was convicted of the murder but avoided the death penalty because he was 17 at the time.
Hill was convicted of raping, torturing and burning Raymond on Sept. 10, 1985, as the boy rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting. Raymond died two days later.
Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove’s decision doesn’t allow Hill to get a new trial; it only allows Hill’s attorneys to formally ask for one.
Attorneys for Hill and the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office argued the issue at a hearing in the courtroom of Judge Andrew Logan of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court in December.
Judge Cosgrove’s decision focused on the main issue at the hearing – whether Hill was “unavoidably prevented” from filing a motion asking for permission to seek a new trial by deadline 120 days after his conviction.
The American Board of Forensic Odontology came out with new guidelines relating to the reliability of bite-mark evidence in 2013.
Dr. Franklin Wright, a dentist and bite-mark expert, provided Hill’s defense team with a written opinion that, based on the 2013 guidelines, the injuries on Fife’s privates that an expert at Hill’s trial said came from Hill “do not represent a human bite mark.”
Trumbull prosecutors countered that Wright’s opinion is not the “newly discovered evidence” that is necessary to grant a new trial. It is “merely a new theory based upon old evidence.”
Judge Cosgrove’s ruling says she will allow Hill to ask for the new trial because the new guidelines on bite-mark evidence were not released until 2013.
“Since the guidelines were not in existence in 1986 at the time of [Hill’s] trial, no amount of due diligence by [Hill’s] trial counsel could have discovered the information that was not in existence,” she said.
The ruling says Judge Cosgrove is not giving an opinion on whether Hill deserves a new trial based on the bite-mark evidence, only stating that she thinks Hill was unavoidably prevented from filing a request for a new trial.
The judge has scheduled a telephone conference for 1 p.m. June 21 at which time the parties will talk about scheduling, including a hearing.
Hill’s attorneys argued that prosecutors relied heavily on bite-mark evidence at Hill’s trial, but prosecutors have said the bite-mark evidence is not “outcome-determinative,” meaning Hill would still have been convicted without it.
Also part of the trial was testimony about Hill admitting being with Combs during the murder, a witness seeing Hill leaving the area of the murder while throwing away a stick, and Hill’s brother seeing Hill at home washing blood from his clothing. A stick was used in the Fife attack.
Hill challenged his death sentence a decade ago by alleging he was mentally retarded, but a visiting judge denied that claim in 2006. Hill still has another appeal pending in the federal courts.