Warren County prosecutors say the Ohio Supreme Court should not consider Ryan Widmer’s murder conviction appeal because it lacks merit and does not present an issue of “public or great general interest.”

Although the convicted bathtub killer’s three trials drew national and even international attention, Assistant Prosecutor Michael Greer — who penned the response filed with the high court — said Widmer’s attorney hasn’t raised any compelling legal issues.

Widmer has been sitting in prison for 21 months after a jury in 2011 found him guilty of drowning his wife Sarah in the bathtub of their Warren County home in August of 2008. He was sentenced to 15 years to life. The first trial in 2009 ended in a mistrial over juror misconduct. The second jury was hung.

His attorney Michele Berry-Godsey filed two appeals with the 12th District Court of Appeals. The judges there denied his first appeal and are still working on the second.

Berry-Godsey’s stance in the first appeal was that police improperly seized the bathtub because they did not specifically name it in the search warrant they obtained for the house. She also said when authorities ripped the fixture out of bathroom, they violated Widmer’s Fourth Amendment rights.

The appeals court said the tub seizure was proper because it was an “instrumentality of the crime.” Greer told the high court case law supports the prosecution’s argument.

“The appellant’s ‘fixture’ argument is a red herring meant to distract this court from the real question at hand: whether or not the tub fell within the scope of the warrant,” he wrote. “And even if the tub did not fall within the warrant’s scope, its value as evidence and as an instrumentality of the crime became apparent during the execution of the search warrant when officers discovered the fingerprints.”

Berry-Godsey also raised the issue of what she called “junk science” — a fingerprint expert who testified during all three trials, the suppression of the lead detective’s credibility issues and former mystery witness Jennifer Crew. The Iowa woman testified in the third trial that Widmer confessed his crime to her during a drunk call in October 2009. If that witness is to be believed, she said, Widmer is guilty of a lesser offense, because the act wasn’t intentional.

Greer only mentioned Crew briefly in a narrative about the case, but went into some detail about former Lt. Jeff Braley and the fingerprint expert who testified about what appeared to be small hands streaking down the back of the tub and a hairy forearm print.

“Since Mr. Hillard used the methodology of latent fingerprint analysis to analyze the fingerprints inside the tub and the forearm impression to form his opinions as to those impressions, his testimony regarding those impressions was scientifically reliable,” he wrote.

The high court only grants jurisdiction in seven to 12 percent of cases filed there. Berry-Godsey said Thursday she hadn’t seen the filing and could not comment.