DAYTON DAILY NEWS Parole Board Urges No Execution Reprieve For Spirko By Tom Beyerlein Dayton Daily News August 30, 2005 In a 6-3 vote, the Ohio Parole Board Tuesday recommended against clemency or a reprieve for John Spirko, who is scheduled to be executed Sept. 10 for the 1982 aggravated murder of rural postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger. The board majority said Spirko's lawyers failed to support their argument that new evidence shows Spirko was unjustly convicted at his 1984 trial. "A sufficient justifiable basis for mercy cannot be found," the board said in its recommendation to Gov. Bob Taft. "There is no manifest miscarriage of justice in the imposition of the sentence." But three dissenters said Taft should grant a reprieve to give U.S. District Court Chief Judge James G. Carr of Toledo time to evaluate Spirko's claims. Spirko, 59, has always maintained he didn't kill the 48-year-old Mottinger in a robbery of the post office in the Van Wert County hamlet of Elgin. His lawyers say the prosecution used a faulty identification of Spirko's friend at the crime scene to implicate Spirko and may have falsely attributed to Spirko crime details that only the killer would know. The dissenters noted that two Ohio Supreme Court justices and four retired federal judges, including a former FBI director, have raised concerns about Spirko's conviction. "If there is even the slightest possibility that errors were made in a conviction where the sentence is death, then that possibility is too great," the minority wrote. Email: Tracy Spirko, John Spirko's Representative