Attorney allowed to withdraw in murder case

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Judge Maureen Sweeney granted a motion by the attorney for Paul Brown, 39, to be removed from the case and appointed a new attorney, Mark Lavelle, to represent him.

A trial date of April 16 has been set for Brown, who is charged in the May 2009 death of Ashten Jackson, who was found in a field on the East Side.

The trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Cours has been delayed several times by mistrials and appeals.

Tony Meranto, Brown’s previous lawyer, had asked in October to withdraw, but at the time, Brown said he wanted Meranto to stay on.

Brown is accused of killing Jackson, 17, sometime around May 24, 2009. Prosecutors say the two were participating in a robbery planned by a third man. Jackson’s body was found May 30, 2009, in a field on the East Side near where the robbery was to take place.

In 2012, a mistrial was declared because of a police report and a video that defense counsel did not have. In 2013, the murder charge was briefly dismissed when Meranto claimed police tampered with Brown’s cellphone. A judge reinstated the charge, however, because testimony at a hearing showed there was no tampering.

In June 2015, the case was declared a mistrial because of a video prosecutors wanted to play that Meranto said he had never seen before the trial.

Meranto had asked the 7th District Court of Appeals in 2015 to have the charges against Brown dropped because he claimed the two mistrials violated Brown’s rights under the constitution that he could not be tried twice for the same offense, but the appeals court ruled against him.