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Home > Blogs > Dayton Courts: Legal and crime news > Archives > 2009 > October > 21 > Entry
China Arnold’s lawyers fight for a new trial
DAYTON — A defense attorney for China Arnold, the Dayton woman convicted last year of killing her baby in a microwave oven, filed a brief Wednesday, Oct. 21, with the Ohio 2nd District Court of Appeals, arguing that Arnold should get a new trial.
Jon Paul Rion’s argument alleges five types of errors, including:
• That Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Mary Wiseman erred by not granting a new trial following a hearing last November.
• That during Arnold’s second trial, Wiseman should have allowed more evidence of another person’s involvement in the crime
• That Wiseman should not have allowed prosecutors to show a videotape of Linda Williams’ testimony from the first trial, which ended in a mistrial. Prosecutors said they could not find Williams.
• That prosecutors committed several acts of prosecutorial misconduct, including failing to disclose witness information and money spent on witnesses.
• The cumulative effect of these errors should also be grounds for a new trial.
Wiseman ruled Dec. 8 that Arnold should not get a third trial, and that all of Rion’s arguments lacked merit. She also dismissed the defense’s call for a special prosecutor to investigate wrongdoing because “there is nothing for a special prosecutor to prosecute.”
The appellate division of the county prosecutor’s office is expected to file a brief to answer Rion’s claims.
In September 2008, Arnold was spared the death penalty after her conviction on aggravated murder; the jury deadlocked during the punishment phase. Wiseman sentenced her to life without the possibility of parole.
Arnold’s baby, Paris Talley, was 28 days old when she died Aug. 30, 2005.
Arnold’s first trial ended in February when a mistrial was declared after a man came forward and said his son, then about 5 years old, saw another boy put the child in a microwave.
Defense attorneys Rion and Kevin Lennen put on several witnesses during a two-day hearing in November. One was Linda Williams, a former Montgomery County Jail inmate who testified during the first trial that Arnold admitted killing her baby. During the hearing, she recanted, but also said she was on “psych meds” and couldn’t recall what she was told.
“Williams’s recantation is so incredible that it cannot form the basis for a third trial,” Wiseman wrote, adding that her hearing testimony included “numerous internal contradictions, outlandish exaggerations and nonsensical explanations.”
Wiseman also wrote about boy identified only by the initials T.H., who testified that another child admitted to him that he placed the baby in the microwave. Wiseman wrote that the boy’s testimony lacked any credibility.
“After two highly publicized trials involving people in his neighborhood, church and family, and involving highly publicized events from three and a half years ago, this is the first time that T.H. has come forward” about the alleged confession, Wiseman wrote. “T.H.’s proffered testimony is indefinite, uncorroborated and cumulative, on top of constituting inadmissible hearsay.”
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