YOUNGSTOWN — After a long delay because of missing files and other issues in the 2003 murder of a baby, the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office has filed its response to death row inmate John Drummond Jr.’s request for a new trial.

Drummond, 48, of Youngstown, was sentenced to death in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in 2004 after being convicted at trial of the 2003 shooting death of 3-month old Jiyen C. Dent Jr. on Rutledge Drive on Youngstown’s East Side. Prosecutors said the gunshots were intended for someone else.

Two assistant federal public defenders asked Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Donofrio last July 17 to grant Drummond a new trial because the attorneys obtained affidavits from two men who testified at Drummond’s trial, one of whom now says the incriminating statements he made were false and that he only testified in that manner in hopes of getting a better outcome in his own criminal case. The men were inmates with Drummond in the Mahoning County jail.

One of the inmates testified to incriminating things he said Drummond told him about the baby’s death while he and Drummond were locked up.

The request for new trial argues that the recantation of testimony is newly discovered evidence that was not available to Drummond within the deadlines normally imposed post-conviction-relief requests.

On Aug. 27, 2025, Assistant Prosecutors John Juhasz and Kristie Weibling asked for an extension of time to respond to the defense filing because of the “voluminous record” in the case, the decades since the case was tried and unavailability of the attorney who tried the case.

There would be many more requests for extensions of time, including one in November 2025 telling Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Donofrio the file for the case was “largely missing” from the prosecutor’s office.

The file was found in January in a locked cabinet in the Mahoning County Clerk of Courts office. It led to the prosecutor’s office filing a 23-page response to the request for a new trial May 4. The Juhasz filing counters the arguments by the defense, stating that there is no valid reason for Drummond to get a new trial.

The prosecution filing argues that Donofrio does not have jurisdiction to hear the matter because the defense failed to show why Drummond was “unavoidably prevented” from raising the issue of the two former inmates “within the period prescribed by law.”

Another reason to deny Drummond a new trial is that the request is unfair to the prosecution in that the attorney who prosecuted the case, Tim Franken, is deceased, and some prosecution records were never found, the “inability to locate trial jurors and lost or destroyed jail records.”

TWO INMATES

Much of the defense request for a new trial relates to two inmates who testified at the trial — Nathaniel Morris and Chauncey Walker — and how important their testimony allegedly was to the state’s case.

The defense filing states that prosecutors said in opening statements in Drummond’s 2004 trial that the two inmates would testify that Drummond said he wanted to kill someone at the home on Rutledge, but did not mean to shoot a baby.

The filing added that Youngstown Police detective Pat Kelly testified that Kelly could not have solved the case without the assistance of the two inmates who testified.

The Juhasz filing frequently stated that allegations in the defense filing were denied to the extent “that the allegations offer opinions rather than factual claims.”

The Juhasz filing also denies the defense argument that prosecutors had a “completely circumstantial case, and the recanting affidavits from Morris and Walker … create(s) a strong probability of a different” outcome in Drummond’s case.

Juhasz described the statements from the two inmates as “sworn testimony of two individuals who are swearing under the pains and penalties of perjury that what they are now saying is true and that what they said at trial, under the very same pains and penalties of perjury, was false.”