Sentencing retrial could return killer to Death Row - Columbus Dispatch
More than a decade after Rayshawn Johnson bludgeoned Shanon Marks to death with a baseball bat, Johnson is getting a second chance to escape Death Row in a first-of-its-kind retrial on Monday.
Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998, but his death sentence was thrown out in 2008 by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which blasted Johnson's attorneys for incompetence. It said that attorneys Pete Pandilidis and Chuck Stidham did such a poor job in the penalty phase of Johnson's trial that he deserved a new trial — but only to determine what punishment should be imposed on the killer.
"He did do it. The conviction stands. His guilt or innocence has been decided. It's not an issue here," said Will Welsh, one of Johnson's new attorneys.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters and chief assistant Mark Piepmeier tried the case in 1998 and won a conviction and death sentence. Now, they will try again to send Johnson to Death Row, but they admit it will be harder.
The most-difficult part of the new trial for both sides will be not revealing to jurors that Johnson is on Death Row for the killing. Jurors in the new trial aren't allowed to be told that.
The new jurors will have to accept that Johnson was convicted of capital murder. They have to base their decision on whether Johnson should live or die on what they hear in the new trial.
Johnson, now 33, was 20 and lived so close to Marks and her husband, Norman, that he could look out his apartment window into the windows in Marks' East Walnut Hills home.
He slipped out of the apartment — he lived with his grandmother — and went into the Markses' bathroom on Nov. 12, 1997, where Shanon Marks was getting ready to go to work at Procter & Gamble. It was the couple's third wedding anniversary.
Johnson beat the 29-year-old with the bat 13 times, the last three in the head, probably so she couldn't identify her attacker. Her husband found her body 13 hours later in a pool of her blood.
In addition to the fatal blows that fractured her skull, she also suffered a broken jaw and a broken left arm.
Johnson was caught partly because, when police questioned neighbors, they noticed he was wearing the same shoes as those that left shoeprints near Marks' body. Police got Johnson to confess three times on tape, which helped a jury quickly decide his guilt in May 1998 and then recommend that he be executed.
But Johnson's penalty was overturned because his attorneys — through "bungling or sheer laziness," the appeals court said — presented no evidence about Johnson's troubled youth in the sentencing phase of the trial to try to spare him from Death Row.
To try to save Johnson's life, his new attorneys will focus on his childhood, hoping to evoke enough sympathy from the jury to get them to sentence him instead to life in prison.
"His mother was absolutely horrendous. She was drug- and alcohol-addicted and was prostituting herself across the country at age 13," Welsh said. "It's so bad, I couldn't make it up if I tried."& amp; amp; lt; /p>
When Johnson was born, he immediately began living with his grandmother, Marian Faulkner.
"Look how well she did with her child," Welsh said, adding the grandmother also was an alcoholic.
A young Johnson endured constant beatings and neglect, Welsh said. That taught him how to treat others once he grew up.
"The damage to this child was immeasurable," Welsh said.
But not as bad as the damage done to the innocent Marks, Deters countered.
Deters interviewed the assistant coroner in the case, Dr. Robert Pfalzgraf, who can't forget it.
"He said out of the 7,000 autopsies he's done, he'll never forget this because of her innocence" and how brutal it was, Deters said.
"I can't imagine what it was like for her family."
If Johnson again is sentenced to death, his appeals will begin anew, and it probably will be at least a decade before he could be executed.
kperry@enquirer.com
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