Petro backs new hearing for Spirko

Defense attorney Thomas Hill said the Ohio Parole Board should tear up its Tuesday recommendation to Gov. Bob Taft that he deny clemency, schedule a new hearing and petition the Ohio Supreme Court to delay Spirko's scheduled Sept. 20 lethal injection.

"The parole board certainly should not be acting upon misrepresentations and incorrect information," Hill said.

Hill called Petro's Friday letter to the board "tantamount to an admission" that the board's 6-3 vote against leniency was based on an inaccurate presentation by Timothy Prichard, Petro's senior deputy.

In the letter to the parole board, Petro said he stands behind Prichard's presentation to the board at Spirko's Aug. 23 clemency hearing, "and I am convinced that there was no attempt to deceive the board." Still, he proposed to make his attorneys and all the evidence available.

"We stand ready to provide any and all information or a full rehearing if (board members) so choose," said Petro spokeswoman Kim Norris.

Parole board spokeswoman JoEllen Lyons said that the board is reviewing its options and probably will respond next week.

At the clemency hearing, Prichard said that during interrogation Spirko gave details of the 1982 murder of Elgin postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger that only the killer would know. He also said Spirko's main interrogator, former U.S. Postal Inspector Paul Hartman, couldn't have put words in Spirko's mouth because the interviews were witnessed by others or because investigators themselves didn't yet know the information Spirko shared.

In fact, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported after the hearing, much of Spirko's supposed guilty knowledge had already been in the newspapers, and Hartman and Spirko were alone during key interviews that were neither recorded nor reduced to writing and signed by Spirko. Prichard was also wrong in saying investigators were unaware of non-public crime details at the time of Spirko's questioning and thus couldn't have led him to discuss them.

State Rep. Shirley Smith, D-Cleveland, wrote to Petro on Thursday "to urge you to own up to these mistakes and clarify the facts for Gov. Taft as he weighs the parole board's recommendation that Spirko not be given clemency.

"With the evidence supporting Spirko's conviction so thin, it was absolutely critical that your office stick to the facts when representing the case to the Ohio Parole Board last week. That clearly did not happen."

There's no physical evidence tying Spirko to Mottinger's abduction in Van Wert County and subsequent stabbing death. At Spirko's 1984 trial, prosecutors used a witness identification of his best friend outside the post office on the fatal day to implicate Spirko. But Hartman said this year that he told a prosecutor before the trial he didn't believe Delaney Gibson was involved. Gibson was never tried and charges against him were dropped.

Tracy Spirko, a former pen pal who married the condemned man by proxy in Texas in February, said she's hopeful the parole board will rehear the case and this time recommend a pardon or reprieve.

"If they could get a rehearing and the truth was told, I think that it might sway them," she said. "The thought of (the impending execution) just makes my skin crawl. If they execute him, they're going to execute an innocent man ? and shame on us."