Brittany Pilkington’s legal team submitted six motions in Logan County Common Pleas Court on April 1, and Judge Mark O’Connor ordered on April 6 that the prosecution had 20 days to respond. If further hearings are required on these motions those will be scheduled at that time.
Pilkington, 23, allegedly confessed to killing 3-month-old Niall Pilkington in July 2014, 4-year-old Gavin Pilkington in April of last year and 3-month-old Noah in August, authorities said.
She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of aggravated murder.
The first motion requests that public access to the online court docket be blocked during the trial, currently scheduled for October, so the jury cannot view it and improperly infer information from prior motions and rulings.
The second asks to sever the three counts arguing that trying all three cases together creates undue prejudice and interferes with Pilkington’s right to a fair trial on each count.
The defense is also asking that all statements Pilkington made to law enforcement be suppressed because they were made involuntarily, violating her rights under the fifth, sixth and fourteenth amendments.
The defense’s memorandum indicates that following the death of her son Noah in the early morning hours of Aug. 18, Pilkington was asked to accompany Detective Dwight Salyer to the Bellefontaine Police Department from Mary Rutan Hospital.
At about 6:33 a.m., she was read her Miranda rights and signed a form purporting to waive those rights, including to have a lawyer present for questioning.
After two to three hours of questioning by police she was transported to the Logan County Sheriff’s Office where a polygraph examination was administered taking about two hours. That was followed by an additional two hours of questioning by police and a Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation officers, according to the court documents.
Those interrogations resulted in, “some incriminating statements, but no confessions to causing the deaths of the children,” according to the defense’s motion.
Police say they obtained a confession that day including an admission by Pilkington that she killed her sons because their father paid them more attention than the couple’s daughter.
“Ms. Pilkington, inexperienced with police questioning, emotionally upset, sleep-deprived and very tired, appears to counsel to have provided self-incriminating statements that were not only involuntary, but also likely highly unreliable, if not outright false in that they appear to have been the statements provided by police with her coerced assent given while she was without any psychological defenses,” the motion reads.
Pilkington's defense previously asked the judge to remove the possibility of the death penalty, but was denied. In a new motion they again are seeking to dismiss the capital components of the case, this time citing a January U.S. Supreme Court decision Hurst v. Florida.
That case held that Florida’s capital sentencing laws violated the sixth amendment right to trial by jury because a judge, not the jury, made determinations about the death penalty. Pilkington’s team argues Ohio’s laws are similar enough to Florida’s to call into question their constitutionality.
In the 2002 case Ring v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that juries, not judges, must make the factual findings to support death sentences.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her 8-1 majority opinion said, like Arizona in the Ring decision, Florida’s approach was doomed because it does not require the jury to make the critical findings to impose a death sentence.
“Ohio’s death-penalty sentencing scheme is similar to Florida’s in several significant ways,” Pilkington’s lawyers Marc Triplett of Bellefontaine, Tina McFall of Dayton and Kort Gatterdam of Columbus wrote.
In both states, the jury listens to a sentencing hearing and then weighs mitigating and aggravating circumstances to determine whether a death sentence is appropriate.
“A jury may make a death-sentence recommendation to the trial court,” Pilkington’s defense writes. “Because the court in Hurst emphasized the language in the Florida statute that defined the jury’s decision as advisory in nature, Ohio’s scheme that similarly classifies a jury’s decision as a recommendation does not accord with the sixth amendment right to a trial by jury.”
Another motion asks that all prospective jurors be required to complete a detailed questionnaire prior to jury selection.
The final motion requests additional evidence discovery and lists a number of specific items the defense wants access to including witness interviews and criminal histories of any potential witnesses, hospital records for Pilkington and her children, documents relating to inventory seized from the Pilkington home including a baby breathing monitor used to treat Noah Pilkington by Toledo Children’s Hospital, all Children Services records related to the foster parents that cared for Noah Pilkington and his sister after April 2015, and much more.
None of Pilkington’s lawyers returned calls for comment Thursday. Neither did Logan County Prosecutor Bill Goslee. The prosecution had not filed any responses to these motions as of Thursday evening.
Pilkington's lawyers have also asked for her trial to be moved out of Logan County and that motion has not yet been ruled on.
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