Former FBI Chief and fed­er­al judge William Sessions recent­ly joined two oth­er for­mer fed­er­al judges and a pros­e­cu­tor urg­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to con­sid­er an appeal from Ohio death row inmate John Spirko. In their brief, Sessions and his col­leagues assert that the pros­e­cu­tion argued a the­o­ry at Spirko’s tri­al that it had to know was at least part­ly sus­pect. ​“When the ulti­mate penal­ty is at issue, jus­tice demands scrupu­lous con­duct from pros­e­cu­tors. It is not enough for a pros­e­cu­tor to weigh all of the evi­dence, deter­mine that a defen­dant is guilty, and pur­sue such a ver­dict vig­or­ous­ly if he holds back infor­ma­tion unfa­vor­able to his desired out­come,” reads the group’s brief.

Ohio orig­i­nal­ly charged Spirko and a co-defen­dant with the mur­der of postal work­er in 1982. Evidence has since sur­faced indi­cat­ing that the state had pho­tos show­ing that the co-defen­dant was 500 miles away at the time of the mur­der. Spirko main­tains that those pho­tos should have been turned over to the defense. The co-defen­dant was nev­er tried for the mur­der and the state even­tu­al­ly dropped charges against him.

William Sessions is a mem­ber of the Constitution Project’s Death Penalty Initiative, which helped orga­nize the writ­ing and sub­mis­sion of the brief on behalf of Spirko. 

(Toledo Blade, February 24, 2005). See Innocence and New Voices. See also the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Series on the Spirko Case.

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