Four men who have maintained their innocence the past three decades since being charged and convicted in the beating death of an Ohio woman could soon be exonerated.
Two of the men have remained in prison since the mid-1990s while the other two spent more than 25 years behind bars before being released on parole in 2020.
A county prosecutor this week filed a motion to vacate the convictions, saying that the case against the four men relied largely on “a witness whose credibility has since unraveled entirely.”
“I found serious flaws in the case that cast overwhelming doubt,” Lorain County Prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson wrote in a letter explaining his decision after spending more than a month reviewing the case.
“It took me a while to get there,” Tomlinson said in an interview Wednesday. “I didn’t want to make assumptions.”
He now says he will immediately recommend dismissing charges against the men if a judge agrees to his request to grant them new trials.
The four — Alfred Cleveland, Benson Davis, John Edwards, and Lenworth Edwards — were convicted in the 1991 killing of Marsha Blakely in Lorain, a city that sits along Lake Erie just west of Cleveland.
Their convictions centered around statements from a witness who demanded money for his testimony and then recanted his story several times. In 2004, the witness voluntarily told the FBI that he had lied about what happened and implicated his father in the killing, according to court documents.
“This all hinged on testimony of man who tried to extort the prosecution,” Tomlinson said, adding there also were holes in the witness’ statements to police.
The witness had described how Blakely was savagely beaten in her apartment, saying chairs and a table had been overturned. But the crime-scene photos showed the furniture was upright with no signs of blood or a struggle, Tomlinson said. “That was my ‘aha’ moment,” he said.
There also was no physical evidence linking the men to the attack, he said.
The prosecutor said he didn’t see any evidence of misconduct by the original investigators and that his decision to seek a dismissal should not diminish Blakely’s death or the pain felt by her family.
“Justice demands action, even when it is difficult. It requires the humility to acknowledge when a case does not meet the high standards required by our legal system, and the courage to correct a mistake,” Tomlinson wrote.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, the former assistant prosecutor who won the original convictions, criticized the move in a statement to media outlets, saying Tomlinson was putting himself above the law.
Lauren Staley, an attorney with the Ohio Innocence Project, which has been seeking to overturn Alfred Cleveland’s conviction for 15 years, said earlier bids for a new trial were denied even after a federal appeals court said he had presented credible evidence of actual innocence.
Cleveland, who was released on parole four years ago, had maintained he was in New York at the time of the killing and had a witness who confirmed his story.
“It’s a little heartbreaking how many opportunities there were to stop this,” Staley said.
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