Kimonie Bryant, 26, left, sits with attorneys Lynn Maro and John Juhasz during a hearing Wednesday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in his aggravated murder case. Bryant was indicted on charges that could result in the death penalty being imposed if convicted. His attorneys have filed another motion asking that the death penalty be removed from Bryant’s charges.

YOUNGSTOWN — Attorneys for Kimonie Bryant again have filed a motion with the court in his aggravated murder case asking for a possible death penalty to be dismissed.

Attorneys John Juhasz and Lynn Maro say capital punishment, as it is administered in Ohio, violates the Ohio and United States constitutions.

Bryant, 26, is one of three men charged in the Sept. 21, 2020, killing of 4-year-old Rowan Sweeney and injuring of four adults in a Perry Street home in Struthers during an apparent robbery.

Bryant and co-defendant Andre McCoy Jr. , 22, both could get the death penalty if convicted of aggravated murder and certain other offenses.

Co-defendant Brandon Crump Jr., 19, was 17 at the time of Rowan’s killing, and officials have said he would not be eligible for the death penalty because of his age. Officials are looking for McCoy, who remains a fugitive.

As with at least one previous filing, Bryant’s attorneys are arguing in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court that the death penalty should be removed because of the way “capital punishment, as it is administered in Ohio, violates the Ohio and United States constitutions because it is virtually without appellate review.”

The 120-page filing, sent to the court last week, states that the way in which Ohio appeals courts review death penalty cases is “not the effective appellate review that is commanded by the Constitution. Appellate review of capital cases in Ohio consists of ignoring errors simply because the prisoner has been found guilty of doing horrendous things; or, finding those errors to be harmless, or even waived.”

It states that “Ohio’s pro forma review of capital cases is a flat denial of due process and of liberties guaranteed by the Ohio Constitution.”

Mahoning County prosecutors have not yet responded to the Bryant filing.

Judge Anthony D’Apolito, who is presiding over the Bryant case, ruled a few months ago against other similar motions, stating that he had “reviewed the long line of established cases involving the issues raised by the defendant” and considered them in his ruling.

HISTORY

LESSON

The filing goes into a lengthy history lesson on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, saying the country’s founders held “debates about what government could or could not do. Today, nearly every modern judicial opinion points in the opposite direction, telling us those things to which a citizen accused of a crime is not entitled.”

Because the United States government was founded on a premise of government having limited powers, Ohio courts are obligated to effectively review criminal convictions, the filing states.

“Rather than erecting a first-line filter to catch serious errors, Ohio’s system of review is a sieve that allows all but the most glaring of errors — and sometimes those as well — to pass through,” Juhasz and Maro stated in the filing.

It quotes professor Anthony Amsterdam, a death penalty attorney who testified before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, that death penalty cases are different from other cases in that “Death is final. Death is irremediable.”

The filing argues that the death penalty in Ohio is “not predictable. Judges of the courts in Ohio have abandoned rational and unemotional patterns of thought when reviewing death penalty cases. Appellate litigation of death penalty cases in Ohio is guided less by legal reasoning and more by whatever has an appearance of being a knee-jerk political reaction.”

WHITE AND BLACK

The filing quotes from the American Bar Association Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Team, including its assertion that a perpetrator “is geometrically more likely to end up on death row if the homicide victim is white rather than black. The implication of race in this gross disparity is not simply explained away and demands thorough examination, analysis and study until a satisfactory explanation emerges which eliminates race as the cause for these widely divergent numbers.”

It states that “those who kill whites are 3.8 times more likely to get the death penalty than those who kill blacks.”

The filing also quotes an Associated Press article that reported that 8 percent of people charged in a possible death penalty case in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) were sentenced to death, but 43 parent in Hamilton County (Cincinnati).

The filing also discusses to two capital murder cases in Trumbull County and goes into detail on the aggravated murder conviction of Sean Carter for the fatal stabbing and rape in 1997 of Veader Prince, his adoptive grandmother in her Southington home. Carter has an execution date of Jan. 22, 2025.

Juhasz worked on the Ohio Supreme Court appeal in Carter’s case that in 2000 affirmed Carter’s death sentence despite a flaw in Carter’s indictment on rape.

“How could Carter be convicted of rape when the indictment failed to mention the essential element of sexual conduct?” the Bryant filing asks. It cited a 1953 Ohio Supreme Court ruling that stated that “failure to insert an essential element into the indictment rendered a court without jurisdiction to try that indictment.”

Without the rape conviction, Carter would not have been eligible for the death penalty, the filing states.

The court’s ruling stated that Carter’s attorneys “vigorously defended against the charge of rape” and “his claim now that he did not have notice of the charges is without merit.”

The court added, “While Carter argues that this defect also affects the aggravated murder charge and the capital specifications attached thereto, this argument lacks merit.”