Donna Roberts takes her death penalty case to state Supreme Court

COLUMBUS — The lone woman on Ohio’s Death Row again asked the state’s high court to overturn her sentence, this time challenging the affirmation of her capital punishment by a judge who didn’t hear the original case.

Legal counsel for Donna Roberts, arguing before the Ohio Supreme Court Tuesday, said she should have been allowed to directly address the new judge as part of the sentencing process.

“The judge who sentenced Donna to death did not preside over the trial, preside over the penalty phase and did not preside over the actual allocution,” said attorney David Doughten. “… Is this permitted under Ohio’s statutory death penalty scheme or … permissible under the Sixth and Eight Amendment?”

He added, “The new judge did not hear Donna actually speak… [That judge] did an evaluation from the bare bones of the allocution. The argument here is that this defeats the process of allocution.”

Prosecutors, however, countered that the new judge involved in the case reviewed all of the case material and appropriately affirmed Roberts’ death sentence. Besides, Roberts told the original jury that capital punishment was the only option in the case, said Assistant Prosecutor LuWayne Annos.

“That’s the sentence that she asked for,” Annos said, adding of Roberts, “There’s no change of heart there. There’s no indication that she regrets her behavior in this case, her role in the murder of her ex-husband. She never expressed remorse, never asked [the original judge] when she did her live allocution to impose a sentence other than the death penalty. She basically used it for self promotion….”

Roberts and her then-boyfriend, Nathaniel Jackson, were sentenced to death for the 2001 murder of her ex-husband, 57-year-old Robert Fingerhut.

According to documents, Jackson and Roberts planned the murder for months, hoping to collect insurance money. Roberts provided Jackson with access to the Howland home she and Fingerhut shared, where Jackson shot the victim multiple times.

Jackson was tried and convicted separately, though his case has a similar series of high-court challenges and remands. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence last August.

Roberts’ case was vacated twice by justices and remanded to the trial court for resentencing, initially because prosecutors had assisted in writing the judge’s original opinion.