Attorney general asks Taft to delay Spirko execution

Set to die on Nov. 29, John Spirko’s lawyers will also try to join a federal lawsuit arguing that Ohio’s lethal injection process could potentially constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Such a move, which the state plans to fight, could indefinitely stay an execution that was originally set for September, 2005.

Assistant Attorney General Heather L. Gosselin has asked Mr. Taft’s office to grant a four-month reprieve while modern DNA testing continues on 22-year-old evidence in the case. That evidence includes an old theater curtain/painting tarp that shrouded the body of Betty Jane Mottinger when her repeatedly stabbed body was found in a soybean field near Findlay weeks after her kidnapping from the Elgin post office.

Spirko, 60, will probably have to wait for Mr. Taft to return from next week’s trade mission in New Mexico to get an answer. Approval would delay the execution until late March, meaning any further decisions regarding Spirko, including potentially on his request for clemency, would be made by Ohio’s next governor.

Spirko’s lawyers hope DNA gathered from the evidence might match someone in a national database or one of a list of other people they have pointed to. Absent that, they hope a complete absence of DNA on the items from Spirko will lend enough doubt on his guilt to at least prompt a grant of clemency.

Spirko had recently been released from a Kentucky prison on an unrelated murder charge and was living in Swanton with his sister at the time of the murder. Although agreeing to the testing and having an outside laboratory conduct it, the state has maintained that evidence implicating another person would not necessarily exonerate Spirko since prosecutors have maintained he didn’t act alone.

a lot of other Ohio death row info on this link: http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061007/NEWS02/61007052

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