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Former Ohio Attorney General fights for new trial for Gillispie
DAYTON — Attorneys for Roger Dean Gillispie, twice convicted of raping three women in August 1988, took his fight for a third trial to the Ohio 2nd District Court of Appeals on Tuesday, July 7.
Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, representing Gillispie along with the Ohio Innocence Project, asked judges James Brogan, Mike Fain and Jeffrey E. Froelich to either grant Gillispie a new trial, or order Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge A.J. Wagner to hold a hearing concerning what the defense calls new evidence.
In July 2008, Wagner denied Gillispie’s request for a new trial, stating there was “no new admissible evidence” that would meet evidence rules requirements. Wagner ruled from attorneys’ briefs, declining to have a hearing on the issue.
Gillispie, 44, who is serving a 16- to 50-year sentence at the London Correctional Institution, has maintained his innocence. He was convicted of two counts of rape, two counts of gross sexual imposition, two counts of kidnapping and one count of aggravated robbery, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Montgomery County prosecutors and Miami Twp. Police Department investigators remain adamant that Gillispie is guilty. They point to the fact that all three victims identified Gillispie as their attacker, though defense attorneys say that those identifications, made nearly two years after the attacks, were tainted through police practices.
His convictions involve the abductions and sexual assaults against twin sisters from Sidney on Aug. 20, 1988 and of a Harrison Twp. woman on Aug. 5, 1988. All of crimes were investigated by the Miami Twp. Police Department.
His first trial ended with convictions in February 1991. He won a new trial after untested crime scene hairs were found at the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory. Later in 1991, he was re-tried and convicted again.
The hairs were found to belong to the victims, Petro told the appeals court judges, who asked about the possibility of DNA testing.
“There’s really nothing left to test,” Petro said.
Petro argued that: — the prosecution violated discovery rules by failing to turn over supplemental police reports. — that 32 studies of eyewitness testimony, all done since Gillispie’s last trial, point to problems that relate to Gillispie’s case and would constitute new evidence. — That new information about an alternative suspect, developed by the defense, should also constitute new evidence.
Wagner rejected all of these arguments in his ruling last year.
Carley Ingram, chief of the Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office appellate division, told the appeals court judges that none of this evidence was new, and that no discovery violations had occurred. The long case record, which includes several appeals and motions for a new trial, would show this, Ingram said.
“He’s been given all the due process he is due,” Ingram said. “He’s never been treated anything less than fairly.”
She also said that Gillispie’s attorneys were raising “old issues already litigated,” dealing with questions about the victims’ identifications and whether Gillispie resembled the victims’ physical descriptions of him. All of these issues had been dealt with during Gillispie’s trials.
Petro said he had sworn affidavits from two former Miami Twp. detectives, who said they had filed supplemental reports which said they did not believe Gillispie was the attacker. Ingram said prosecutors never saw those supplemental reports and that the defense has never proven they existed, or that they contain exculpatory information that would be admissible in court.
She also said that one of the former detectives joined the defense team before the first trial, so the team should have known then if something was missing from police records.
Ingram also said that studies of eyewitness testimony would not qualify as new evidence. That the defense team had identified the other man as a possible suspect before Gillispie’s new trial, so that would not be new evidence either, she said.
Petro compared the studies to new scientific developments in DNA testing. He also said that, years after the trial, the defense team had documented incriminating statements by the defense team’s suspect. Those statements to a former girlfriend uncannily matched statements the attacker made to the victims, Petro said.
“I would submit to you that everything is new,” Petro said.
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