The Ohio Parole Board recommended Tuesday that a prisoner who has spent 30 years on death row for two murders he says he did not commit should have his sentence commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole as early as 2029.
The recommendation landed on Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk a week after Tyrone Noling asked the board for a full pardon.
Now the fate of the 54-year-old Noling, whose bid for exoneration has garnered celebrity support from Kim Kardashian and actors Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, is in the hands of an outgoing Republican governor who, as a state senator, co-sponsored the legislation that reinstated capital punishment in Ohio in 1981.
Since then, DeWine has had a change of heart, and in June he called on lawmakers to eliminate the death penalty, saying “the moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”
“We are encouraged that the Parole Board has taken a step towards recognizing the gross injustice Tyrone Noling has endured for decades,” said Brian Howe of the Ohio Innocence Project, one of Noling’s attorneys. “We hope Gov. DeWine will pardon Tyrone and allow an innocent man to go home at last.”
DeWine has the power to pardon Noling, but he can also reduce his sentence or stay the execution to provide more time to pursue a legal remedy.
One of the eight parole board members who took part in this case, former prosecutor Shontell Walker, was in favor of granting Noling a pardon, according to the board’s recommendation. Five were in favor of commuting his sentence and two were opposed.
Noling, whose case has been the subject of documentaries and true-crime podcasts, has said he won’t accept a commutation of his sentence to life without parole.
Typically, death row inmates aren’t allowed clemency hearings until they have an execution date. Noling doesn’t have one. And during his appearance before the parole board, his lawyers argued that he had nothing to do with the murders of an elderly couple.
Prosecutors, however, have insisted that Noling is an unrepentant killer who at age 18 was part of a gang that did a string of robberies in Portage County, where he gunned down Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, on April 5, 1990, inside their home in Atwater Township.
Bearnhardt Hartig was shot three times and his wife five times with a .25-caliber automatic handgun. Their house had been ransacked.
Noling was convicted on the strength of testimony from three other members of the gang who were 14, 15 and 16 at the time. They later retracted their statements, saying that police pressured them to name Noling as the shooter.
While aggravated burglary charges brought against Noling were dropped in 1992, a grand jury reindicted him in 1995 for the Hartig murders.
Noling was sentenced to death in 1996, even though no physical evidence tied him to the crime and no murder weapon was ever found.
While Noling languished on death row, the Innocence Project lawyers uncovered law enforcement notes that pointed to three other potential suspects, including Dan Wilson, who was executed by lethal injection in Ohio in 2009 for the 1991 murder of a young woman.
The Ohio Innocence Project lawyers wrote in court documents that the accused man’s original defense team was not aware, during his murder trial, that Wilson’s foster brother had told police that Wilson had bragged about killing the Hartigs.
Also, Noling’s defense attorneys were aware that DNA testing on a cigarette butt found by detectives on the Hartigs’ driveway did not place Noling — or any of the three other teens — at the scene at the time.
But they weren’t aware of a June 1991 blood-typing lab report that concluded that the cigarette could have been smoked by somebody like Wilson.
Noling also got a boost from former Portage County Sheriff Ken Howe, now 83, whose department spent over two years reviewing the case but refused to hand it over to prosecutors because no weapon or physical evidence linked Noling and the other teenagers to the crime.
It was the local prosecuting attorney and his investigators who secured the grand jury indictment against Noling.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Howe said that there were red flags when police were investigating Noling for the slayings and the evidence that has accumulated since then has convinced him that neither Noling nor the other members of the alleged robbery gang were involved in the double murder.
“I believe that these boys were, and are, innocent,” he said.
