Ohio Supreme Court rules against Marion ex-death row inmate, upholds death penalty laws

MARION — The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled against an ex-death row inmate from Marion and upheld the state's death penalty laws as constitutional.

Maurice A. Mason, 54, was initially sentenced to death in 1994 after a jury found him guilty of raping and murdering a 19-year-old woman from Essex, a small Union County community.

On appeal, Mason and his attorneys tried to have the death penalty piece of his sentencing thrown out, arguing that — under a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Florida case — Ohio's process for sentencing defendants to death is unconstitutional.

Ultimately, the Ohio Supreme Court justices disagreed with Mason and his legal team, denying Mason's motion to throw out the death penalty piece in a 7-0 decision issued Wednesday.

The ruling overturns a decision initially made by Marion County Common Pleas Court Judge William Finnegan.

Todd Anderson, one of the attorneys representing Mason, called the high court's decision "disappointing." Anderson and Mason's other attorneys will likely ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, he said, though they had not come to a final decision.

In the Florida case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida's capital sentencing scheme violated the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury by requiring the judge — rather than the jury — to make the findings necessary to impose the death penalty, according to the court's opinion.

Mason's legal team tried to draw parallels between Ohio's and Florida's death penalty sentencing processes, arguing that Ohio's laws also violated the Sixth Amendment.

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But in their decision, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Patrick Fischer wrote that "Mason misses a key distinction between Ohio's statutory scheme and the Florida ... statutory schemes at issue."

Fischer pointed to several ways that Ohio law differs from Florida's, including the requirement in Ohio that a jury find beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a specific aggravating factor to the offense, one that makes the defendant eligible for the death penalty.

In Mason's case, he was eligible for the death penalty because he committed murder and rape at the same time.

Mason's victim was Robin Dennis. She went missing on Feb. 9, 1993, and her vehicle was found in rural Marion County the next day, the Star has reported. A few days later, her body was found, mostly nude, in an abandoned building.

She had suffered multiple skull fractures from being beaten with a nail-covered board. DNA evidence from semen further linked Mason, then 29, to the crime, the Star reported.

In the coming months, Mason will likely go before the Marion County Common Pleas Court to be re-sentenced, said Marion County Assistant Prosecutor Kevin Collins.

In 2008, a federal appeals court ordered him to be re-sentenced, ruling 2-1 that his legal team had made serious mistakes during the sentencing phase of his 1994 trial.

That re-sentencing, which could again include execution, had been on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considered his appeal to have the death penalty piece thrown out on constitutionality grounds.

svolpenhei@gannett.com

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