Friends:
This is the NCADP alert on John Spirko. At the bottom, there is a "take action" component. Please distribute far and wide! National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Execution Alert John Spirko September 20, 2005 Ohio The state of Ohio is set to execute John Spirko, a 59-year-old Caucasian man, on Sept. 20 for the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Betty Mottinger in Van Wert County. Mottinger was the postmistress in Elgin, Ohio when she disappeared on Aug. 9, 1982. Her body was found several weeks later in a field; she had been stabbed multiple times. At the time of the crime, John Spirko had already developed a criminal record. He was incarcerated in Kentucky for murder in 1970. After his release in 1980, he was incarcerated again for parole violations and faced a longer sentence after an attempted escape from jail in October of 1982. Facing a potential transfer to Kentucky's penal system to continue his life sentence for which he had originally received parole, Spirko decided to take advantage of everything he had read about the Mottinger case. He knew that police were anxious to find the killer, and he thought he might be able to lessen his punishment by providing information, even if the information he would provide was false. In interviews with police, Spirko implicated a few men in the kidnapping and murder of Mottinger. Although all of the leads he provided to police turned out to be false, authorities were not able to locate one suspect, Delaney Gibson. Gibson and Spirko met in prison in Kentucky, and during the few months Spirko underwent interviews with police about the Mottinger murder, Gibson was hiding as a fugitive and was not questioned. When Gibson was eventually arrested in late 1982, police found that he had an alibi for the time period directly before the crime. He was in North Carolina, over 500 miles away just hours before the crime was committed. Gibson admitted that he was friends with Spirko but denied any involvement in the murder of Mottinger. Gibson escaped from jail again before trial, but after a grand jury indicted both Spirko and Gibson. The case presented against John Spirko was fraught with evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Nearly all of the evidence presented by the prosecution rested on the purported collaboration between Spirko and Delaney Gibson, his friend and so-called accomplice. One prosecution witness testified that she was "100 percent sure" that Gibson was at the post office on the day of the kidnapping. Another eyewitness, giving testimony under hypnosis, stated that he was about 70 percent sure that Spirko was at the post office as well. The prosecution repeatedly stressed to the jury that Spirko and Gibson were close friends, probably hoping that this would sway jurors to believe that they would have been and were together at the post office on the day of Mottinger's disappearance. However, the prosecution did not present Gibson's alibi to the jury nor to the defense attorneys, something the prosecuting attorneys should have done under the law. During the appeals process, the Sixth Circuit Court argued that even though the prosecution withheld the information about Gibson's whereabouts prior to the crime, a reasonable jury would still have convicted Spirko based on his knowledge of nonpublic information. This is factually incorrect. The prosecution highlighted several facts that Spirko knew about the crime, including the number of times the victim was stabbed and the location of the wounds. Actually, this information was made public through newspaper articles prior to Spirko's comments about the crime to police. Only two pieces of information that Spirko supposedly provided have still been upheld as nonpublic. This case demonstrates the snags in our justice system. Eyewitness testimony is consistently unreliable. In this instance, the eyewitness who placed Gibson at the scene of the crime insisted that he was clean shaven although pictures of Gibson at times before and after the crime showed him having a full beard. Delaney Gibson was never charged for the murder of Mottinger. He was arrested several more times in the 1980s, yet Ohio prosecutors never sought to try him for the murder of Mottinger, even after they so ardently argued his involvement during Spirko's trial. Gibson was paroled in Kentucky in 1998. Finally, in 2004 charges were dropped against Gibson. Van Wert County Prosecutor Charles Kennedy acknowledged that it was a circumstantial case in the 1980s and that too much time had passed to try Gibson. In fact, there is no statute of limitations for murder. The state's unwillingness to try Gibson only adds to the argument that their case against him was weak at best. Without the state's confidence that Gibson was truly involved in the crime, how can it possibly defend the conviction of Spirko knowing that there was no forensic evidence linking Spirko to the crime, nor is there a written or recorded confession of his involvement? In an Amicus Curiae brief presented to the Supreme Court, four former prosecutors and judges note that the prosecutors urged the jury to look at the bits and pieces of evidence they presented in a sense of the "whole package." Over time, they note that the "whole cloth has unraveled down to the thread of two possibly nonpublic facts an investigator asserted John Spirko told him- and that investigator was demonstrably wrong in his assertion that the other facts were nonpublic." In the words of the brief's authors, "A man's life should not dangle by so thin a thread when there exists opportunity for further inquiry." The truth is, the state of Ohio should not be defending the conviction of John Spirko, and it most definitely should not uphold his execution date. Please write to Governor Taft in support of clemency. To take action to oppose this execution, please go to http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/ncadp/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1 133 and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
