Trumbull prosecutor to judge: Strike Danny Lee Hill filing

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

The Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office has asked a visiting judge to strike the entire 419-page document filed this week by attorneys for Danny Lee Hill that ask for the judge to grant him a new trial.

Hill, 49, is on death row for killing Raymond Fife, 12, in September 1985 in a wooded area along Palmyra Road Southeast.

Visiting Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove recently granted attorneys for Hill the opportunity to ask the judge for a new trial based on bite-mark evidence used at Hill’s trial that Hill’s attorneys said has been proven unreliable.

Hill’s attorneys “filed a 47-page motion augmented with 20 exhibits on June 13, 2016,” the prosecutor’s office said in Thursday’s filing. “This motion totals more than 400 pages, most of which have absolutely NOTHING to do with bite marks detected on Raymod Fife’s lifeless body 30 years ago,” the prosecutor’s motion says.

“The state submits that the bulk of [Hill’s] motion is so far beyond the scope of this court’s [permission] that it should be stricken immediately.”

As an example, Hill’s filing includes an affidavit questioning whether Hill was too intellectually disabled to be interviewed by police, a question that “has been litigated and relitigated ad nauseam in the state and federal courts for 30 years,” the prosecutor’s office filing says.

“The defense here makes a brazen attempt to taint other heretofore uncontroverted evidence – separate and apart from the bite-mark evidence already at issue – which was accepted by a three-judge panel and affirmed repeatedly as sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction on multiple counts, not just the oral rape of the victim, and the lawfully imposed death penalty.”

The prosecutor’s filing says a phone conference scheduled for Tuesday morning would be premature without the judge first reviewing the prosecutor’s formal response to Hill’s request for a new trial, to be filed later, as well as the entire case file, record and proceedings of the three-judge panel that convicted Hill and imposed the death penalty.

“As has been discussed in previous filings, the considerable amount of other evidence positively identifying [Hill] as one of only two assailants in the systematic destruction of this child precludes the need for a new trial. He is no innocent man. The record and facts show he will always remain guilty.”

In a separate filing, the prosecutor’s office asks Judge Cosgrove to set a date for the prosecutor to file a response to Hill’s motion for a new trial.