Freed after 21 years, man looks back on slog
To the police called to the reported home invasion in Lancaster, a few things felt off from the start.
One of the officers who responded that winter day in 2000 noted in a report “the lack of fresh footprints in the snow,” odd for a violent crime that reportedly involved more than one suspect.
Inside the house, that officer’s questions continued. Some rare comic books and $10,000 had been reported taken from a safe, along with some select pieces of jewelry.
“The house was gone through far too selectively for my taste,” the officer wrote.
A detective who interviewed the two adult victims reported that one “seemed to be relaying a story rather than recalling from memory.”
And the neighbors, well, none of them recalled seeing anything unusual when the crime was to have occurred.
Some of these details might have helped Ralph Blaine Smith at trial, if he and his attorneys had known about them.
But the evidence was never provided by the Fairfield County prosecutor at the time, Gregg Marx. And Smith, based on the identification of the adult victims who said both their assailants were masked but that the mask of one kept falling down, was sent to prison for 67 years.
Now he is free, after a 21-year slog marked by failed appeals, legal deadends and dogged determination.
The Smith case exhibits how easily our criminal justice system, which we like to believe rests immoveable upon a strong foundation, can be tipped on its side by the actions of just one of its key players.
So compromised, it is a monster to get right-side-up again.
Smith, 46, shared his story throughout this summer with Dispatch court reporter John Futty. Last week, Smith received the news he’d been hoping for, that current Fairfield County Prosecutor Kyle Witt had decided to dismiss all charges against
him rather than pursue another trial.
Smith maintained from the start that he was innocent, but it took years to shake loose the information that ultimately set him free.
Early on, his maternal grandmother provided the money to push his legal fight, but she died in 2006. He researched the law and filed motions himself. A cousin lent a hand. Eventually, attorney Joe Landusky joined his quest. Martin Yant, a Columbus private investigator with a long track record of ferreting out compromised criminal cases, dug up much of the evidence that cast doubt on whether the home invasion had occurred at all.
It was evidence that Marx had known about at the time of trial, but decided not to turn over to the defense.
Under law, prosecutors have to turn over exculpatory evidence, which is any information that could create reasonable doubt about a defendant’s guilt.
Marx testified at a hearing before Fairfield County Common Pleas Court Judge Richard E. Berens nearly a year ago that he did not provide the evidence to the defense because he did not view it as “exculpatory.”
I covered police and crime for years and have spent a good amount of time in court. I know what I think, but I did not go to law school.
Berens did, though, and here’s his take on Marx’s decision to sit on the information, particularly that one officer’s supplemental report:
“Given what little was presented at trial, Smith could have used these suppressed materials to put on a much stronger defense by cultivating an entirely new angle of doubt: that perhaps no crime occurred at all,” Berens wrote. “Suggestions that a crime did not actually occur would fit most definitions of ‘exculpatory,’ in this court’s view.”
Berens ruled on June 9 that Smith
“Given what little was presented at trial, Smith could have used these suppressed materials to put on a much stronger defense by cultivating an entirely new angle of doubt: that perhaps no crime occurred at all.”
Richard E. Berens
Fairfield County Common Pleas Court Judge
deserved a new trial, saying the withheld evidence “undermined confidence in the verdict...and violated Smith’s right to due process.”
Upon dismissing all charges, Witt noted that he was not declaring Smith innocent. Because Smith had already served 21 years, the prosecutor simply said he had decided to forego another trial.
He also did not want to label those long-ago decisions by Marx prosecutorial misconduct.
He did say, “I think I would have provided information that this office didn’t provide 20 years ago.”
Maybe Marx made an honest judgment call. But given Smith’s conviction, and his 21-year struggle to undo it, one is left to wonder what other judgment calls Witt’s predecessor made during his 34 years with the Fairfield County prosecutor’s office.
tdecker@dispatch.com