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Former FBI Chief Supports Killer's Plea Spirko Seeking To Overturn Death Sentence
The Toledo Blade
Mr. Sessions joined two former federal judges and a prosecutor yesterday in accusing Van Wert County's former prosecutor of arguing a theory before Spirko's jury 22 years ago that the prosecutor had to know was at least partly suspect. Mr. Sessions, who was FBI director under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is also a former federal judge. "When the ultimate penalty is at issue, justice demands scrupulous conduct from prosecutors," reads the group's brief urging the high court to hear Spirko's appeal. "It is not enough for a prosecutor to weigh all of the evidence, determine that a defendant is guilty, and pursue such a verdict vigorously if he holds back information unfavorable to his desired outcome," it reads. Mr. Sessions declined an interview. He is now a member of the Washington-based Constitution Project's Death Penalty Initiative, which has sought a number of reforms in the capital punishment process. The group has not advocated abolition of the death penalty, and Mr. Sessions personally supports capital punishment, according to the Constitution Project's Pedro Ribiero. A 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel voted 2-1 vote last year to uphold Spirko's conviction and sentence for the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Betty Jane Mottinger, 48-year-old postmaster in the small town of Elgin, 90 miles southwest of Toledo. She had been stabbed about 15 times in the chest and stomach. The majority found that photographs kept more than a decade by the prosecution, which suggested Spirko's alleged co-conspirator was probably 500 miles away in North Carolina at the time of the crime, were insufficient to overturn the conviction. "If [Delaney] Gibson was not a participant in the murder, then he was not, as Spirko told the investigators and claimed at trial, the source of all of Spirko's detailed knowledge of the crime," wrote Judge Alice M. Batchelder for the majority. "And if Spirko did not learn the details of this crime from Gibson, from whence did all of that detail come?" But dissenting Judge Ronald Lee Gilman wrote that he was not convinced of Spirko's guilt. He said many details about the crime had been published in local newspapers. Spirko, now 58, was born in Toledo. Paroled on a Kentucky murder conviction, he had returned to Swanton to live with his sister in 1982. Jailed on an unrelated assault charge, he contacted investigators claiming to have evidence in the unsolved murder of Ms. Mottinger months earlier. In return, he wanted leniency for himself and his girlfriend for a botched prison escape. Prosecutors ultimately discarded most of Spirko's stories as fabrications. But fragments of those tales, details investigators argued could only be known to the killer, were later used to convict him. The prosecution's theory was that Gibson, who had fled Ohio, was the chief perpetrator. Eyewitnesses placed both him and Spirko in Elgin the morning that Ms. Mottinger disappeared. But further investigation led the prosecution to confirm that Gibson was in North Carolina the day before and after the murder and that photographs showed him with a full beard. An eyewitness, now dead, had identified an old photograph of a clean-shaven Gibson as the stranger she saw that day. The prosecution informed the defense of the alibi claim and noted there were "purported" pictures supporting that claim. The defense argues that the use of the word "purported" was misleading because the prosecution already had the photos in hand. "The prosecutors provided sufficient evidence to put Spirko on notice," reads the opposing brief filed yesterday by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro. "He failed to seek additional evidence [probably because that evidence would have done him no good on his theory of the case]." Gibson has since been paroled in Kentucky on a separate murder conviction. He was never tried in Ohio, and, on the day the 6th Circuit upheld Spirko's conviction last year, the prosecution dismissed its 22-year-old murder indictment against Gibson.
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