Hilltop man declared not guilty in 2018 murder
A Franklin County jury acquitted a 34-year-old Hilltop man in a 2018 murder on Friday afternoon, hours after telling the judge that they were struggling to agree on a verdict.
Lonzo A. Doughty had been in the Franklin County jail since his arrest in December 2018 for the shooting death of 31year-old Julian Higgins, whose body was discovered beside a trash bin at a notorious West Side apartment complex on Aug. 20, 2018.
Jurors deliberated for about 11 hours over parts of two days before finding Doughty not guilty.
At about 11 a.m. Friday, Common Pleas Judge Richard A. Frye received a message from the jury indicated that they were deadlocked. He brought them back into the courtroom and instructed them to continue deliberating. They reached a verdict at about 4 p.m.
The prosecution's case hinged on the credibility of two witnesses who testified that they were in the apartment in the 600 block of Wedgewood Drive at the Wedgewood Village Apartments complex when the shooting occurred.
Wedgewood Village has been plagued by violent crime, with seven homicides occurring there in 2017 alone.
Assistant Prosecutors Daniel Lenert and Zachary Imwalle conceded during the trial that no physical evidence linked Doughty to the crime scene, where a drop of Higgins' blood was found.
The prosecution instead relied on the testimony of two professed eyewitnesses, both of whom said they saw Doughty shoot Higgins once during an argument in the apartment.
Defense attorney Joe Landusky called the defendant's wife, Torri
Doughty, as an alibi witness during the trial. She testified that she left the apartment complex with her husband before the murder took place.
Before the jury returned its verdict, Frye expressed his own doubts about the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. In a separate ruling after the jury began deliberating, he found Doughty not guilty of possessing a weapon, something Doughty was prohibited from having because of a prior felony conviction.
“The state's two key witnesses on identification were not persuasive and lacked familiarity with the concept of telling the truth,” Frye said in making his decision.
The defense had asked the judge rather than the jury to handle the weapons-possession charge. The tactic is commonly used by defense attorneys in jury trials to prevent jurors from hearing about a defendant's criminal history.
Columbus police charged Doughty with the crime about a month after the shooting, based on what they called an anonymous tip.
A man taking out the trash discovered Higgins' body beside a Dumpsterstyle bin outside the apartment building at about 3:15 a.m., within hours of the shooting. Paramedics pronounced Higgins dead at the scene.
An autopsy determined Higgins had been shot once in the torso.
Torri Doughty, 32, pleaded guilty in October 2019 to a misdemeanor count of obstructing official business for lying to police about the whereabouts of her husband, who was arrested in December 2018 after police found him in her Worthington apartment.
Frye sentenced her after the plea to 13 days in the county jail, the amount of time she had served immediately following her arrest. jfutty@dispatch.com @johnfutty