Ohio inmate freed in 1988 murder sues prosecutors

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CINCINNATI (AP) — An Ohio man freed after spending 20
years in prison for a murder that his attorneys say he didn’t commit has
sued those responsible for his conviction, accusing them of taking
advantage of his mental illness and railroading him into confessing.
The
civil rights lawsuit, filed in federal court in Cleveland on Monday,
says that Richland County Prosecutor James Mayer and his employees
violated Tinney’s constitutional rights by exploiting his
well-documented and severe mental illness, and used coercion and bribery
to secure his confession.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified
damages, also accused the county of implementing a de facto policy of
pursuing wrongful convictions "through profoundly flawed investigations
and coerced evidence."
"This case is extremely troubling because
the people who were supposed to protect Mr. Tinney exploited his
vulnerability and caused him to confess to a crime that they knew he
couldn’t have committed," one of Tinney’s attorneys, Samantha Liskow,
said Wednesday.
Mayer did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday. County commissioners declined to comment.
Tinney
pleaded guilty in 1992 to the beating death four years earlier of
33-year-old Ted White at the waterbed store White owned in Mansfield in
northern Ohio. He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
Tinney
confessed to the murder while serving time in prison in an unrelated
robbery after the prosecutor’s office targeted the case as part of
Mayer’s campaign promises to solve cold cases.
Richland County
Judge James DeWeese ordered Tinney’s release last year, saying that
while it was impossible to prove his innocence, his confessions didn’t
support a murder conviction and in fact, suggested that he was not
guilty.
DeWeese’s order came after a weeklong evidentiary hearing,
which showed that Tinney’s five separate confessions to the murder
varied greatly from one another and that most of the details he gave did
not match the facts of the case, including the murder weapon used.
"Mr.
Tinney confessed to killing a man he could not identify (in
photographs), for conflicting motives which don’t match the facts, at
the wrong time of day, with a weapon that does not match the victim’s
injuries, by striking him in the wrong part of his head, and stealing
items the victim either still possessed after the attack or probably
never possessed," DeWeese wrote.
Prosecutors are appealing DeWeese’s order.
At
the time of his confessions, Tinney was not taking medication for
paranoid schizophrenia and depression, suffered from hallucinations and
delusions, and could not discern fact from fiction, according to the
lawsuit.
"Mr. Tinney’s mental illness made it impossible for him
to either provide reliable information to (the prosecutor’s office)
regarding the White homicide or exercise his free will to confess to a
crime," according to Monday’s lawsuit. "This would have been immediately
obvious to anyone interacting with Mr. Tinney."
Tinney’s case
only was reopened after a Mansfield police officer named Eric Bosko, who
said he felt certain of Tinney’s innocence, brought it to the attention
of the Cincinnati-based Ohio Innocence Project, which defends inmates
they’ve identified as being wrongly imprisoned.
Mayer has argued
in court that Tinney is guilty and that his inconsistent confessions are
the product of police animosity toward him.
Mayer said that when
he ran for prosecutor in 1988, most Mansfield police officers backed his
opponent. He also cited several conflicts with the agency’s officers
over the years.
DeWeese rejected those arguments, finding the
Mansfield officers who worked on the case were professional and their
investigation extensive.
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Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AmandaLeeAP
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