YOUNGSTOWN — Arturo Novoa, who killed his girlfriend, Shannon Graves, 29, in 2017 and then dismembered and disposed of her body, will get a “limited” new sentencing hearing.

The 7th District Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the sentencing must be carried out again because of an error by Judge Anthony Donofrio of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in June 2019, regarding how he sentenced Novoa, who is now 36.

The appeals panel found nothing wrong with the guilty plea Novoa entered in the murder of Graves and the 42 other offenses. Novoa’s “guilty pleas and subsequent guilt findings are affirmed,” the ruling states.

The appeals panel said the attorneys for Novoa did not raise the errant sentencing issue “in detail” in its written appeals document, only raising the issue during an oral argument in the appeals case.

The issue needing to be corrected pertains to “merger” of some of the convictions for sentencing purposes, the ruling states. Merger means combining separate convictions into one if they arise from the same single act.

When a judge merges two offenses, he or she must identify which one will receive the sentence. But Donofrio entered sentences on both, some of them to run at the same time and some to run one after the other.

The reason this is an error is that it results in a defendant having more convictions on his or her record than authorized by law, the appellate opinion states.

Novoa was sentenced to 48 years to life.

During Novoa’s sentencing hearing, attorney Stephanie Anderson of the Ohio Attorney General’s office said the Novoa case included the “most gruesome and horrific details in Mahoning County” crime history.

She recounted how Novoa and Graves met in April 2016 and lived together at a home on Mahoning Avenue in Youngstown, but their relationship was volatile, and Novoa killed her in the home Feb. 24, 2017, apparently with a heavy, metal object.

He then placed her body in the trunk of her car and took it to the home of Novoa’s girlfriend, Katrina Layton, on Shields Road, where Novoa and co-defendant Andrew Herrmann dismembered the body and put it in storage totes and returned it to the home on Mahoning Avenue.

The following month, Novoa held a bonfire at a home on Sherwood Avenue to destroy Graves’ clothes, papers and other items.

Novoa and Layton used sulfuric acid on parts of the body, but the parts that remained were moved to a freezer at the Mahoning Avenue residence, where they remained until July 2017. Novoa eventually moved the freezer to a friend’s home in Campbell, where the friends discovered the remains in a backpack and called police.