Justice demands inmate be spared!! Have you heard of reasonable doubt?

On Wednesday, the board voted 6-3 against a clemency recommendation.

The dissenting members concluded that there is too much "residual doubt" to execute Spirko for the 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger.

Mottinger was abducted from a rural post office in Elgin, Ohio, and
stabbed to death. The board's dissenters were "perplexed" by the trial
theory that Spirko committed the crime with his friend Delaney Gibson.

"The State claims that all exculpatory evidence was provided to Spirko's
defense. It appears that some crucial evidence was not made available."
The jury never saw evidence that placed Gibson in North Carolina the day
before the abduction.

"Those photos are significant, as they contrast with Opal Seibert's
eyewitness testimony that the man she identified as Gibson on August 9th
was clean-shaven. . . . We cannot ignore the possibility that Gibson was
600 miles away."

Gibson was never tried, so it appears the state used a phony Gibson link
to convict Spirko.

Dissenters questioned the credibility of key investigator and lead witness
for the state, Paul Hartman: "Hartman, on three recent separate occasions to three separate groups of people, stated he never believed that Gibson was involved."

Hartman claims he said that to mislead reporters and others.

"His apparent deceitful conduct at this critical juncture in the process is reprehensible and further amplifies the claims made by Spirko's counsel suggesting a history of Hartman misconduct."

Then there's Spirko's alibi.

"Spirko and his counsel suggest a plausible alibi that includes a timetable which, if true, would have made it impossible for him to have committed the Mottinger crime."

Spirko said he saw his parole officer and took his sister to the doctor the day of the kidnapping. Dissenters asked, where's the state's timetable?

Then there's John Willier.

Willier contacted William Latham, an investigator for the Wyandot County
prosecutor in 1997, saying another man was involved in the crime. Latham told the FBI, which referred him to the U.S. Postal Service, where Hartman handled it. No one interviewed Willier.

"It is inexplicable as to why the 1997 lead was not pursued. . . . Without
an investigation of Willier's 1997 interview, we are again left to suspect
that others, possibly unrelated to Spirko, played a role in the Mottinger
crime."

Finally, no physical evidence links Spirko to the crime.

"While latent fingerprints were found at the Elgin post office, they were
not the prints of either Spirko or his alleged co-defendant Gibson. . . .
We are left with a case based on circumstantial evidence and questionable eyewitness testimony."

This case drew more pro-clemency mail than any other Ohio death row case: Nearly 3,000 favored it, and just 15 opposed it.

Write Gov. Bob Taft at 77 S. High St., 30th Floor, Columbus, Ohio 43215.

Contact him at www.governor.ohio.gov.

Tell him you agree with the dissenters: "Justice is best served in this matter by commuting John Spirko's sentence from death to life without the possibility of parole."

(source: Column, Regina Brett, Cleveland Plain Dealer)

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JEERS . . .

to the Ohio Parole Board majority for its steadfast refusal to recognize
the ample reasonable doubt that John Spirko murdered small-town Postmistress Betty Jane Mottinger in 1982. "The majority is not convinced
that any manifest injustice occurred in Mr. Spirko's case," the board reported on Wednesday. The injustice will be very permanently manifest if the state executes him. Gov. Bob Taft has absolutely nothing to lose by
exercising his authority to commute Spirko's sentence to life in prison.

(source: Cleveland Plain Dealer)

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