A three-part series appearing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer examines the capital conviction of John Spirko, who remains on Ohio’s death row for the 1982 murder of Elgin, Ohio postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger. The paper’s investigation found that Spirko’s imagination and “not much else” had brought him to the brink of execution despite concerns of his innocence. Shortly after Mottinger’s body was found, Spirko voluntarily contacted police to provide information about the murder. According to the paper’s investigation, Spirko’s ill-conceived plan was to use false information about the crime as leverage to secure a sentencing deal for two unrelated felonies and an agreement that his girlfriend would be given probation for assisting him in a prison escape attempt. Federal authorities initially agreed to his terms and conducted a series of 15 interviews with Spirko, most featuring a shifting and contradictory series of accounts that Spirko said he learned about at several Toledo-area parties.
Six weeks after the interviews began, Spirko, a known liar within the law enforcement community, “had talked himself right onto Ohio’s death row.” More than two decades later, the Plain Dealer’s news investigation of Spirko’s case details the role that over-zealous investigators, prosecutorial misconduct, and conflicting eye-witness testimony have played in Spirko’s case. Judge Ronald Lee Gilman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit stated in a dissenting opinion that the state’s case against Spirko was built “on a foundation of sand” and that the “complete absence” of physical evidence against him raised considerable doubt about his guilt.
(The Plain Dealer, January 23-25, 2005). See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the series. See also Innocence.
