The Ohio Parole Board recommended Tuesday that a prisoner who has spent 30 years on death row for two murders he says he did not commit should have his sentenced commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole as early as 2029.The recommendation landed on Gov.
Mike DeWine’s desk a week after Tyrone Noling asked the board for a full pardon.Tyrone Noling.Ohio Department of Rehabilitation & CorrectionNow the fate of the 54-year-old Noling, whose bid for exoneration has garnered celebrity support from Kim Kardashian and actors Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, is in the hands of an outgoing Republican governor who, as a state senator, co-sponsored the legislation that reinstated capital punishment in Ohio in 1981.Since then, DeWine has had a change of heart, and in June he called on lawmakers to eliminate the death penalty, saying “the moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”DeWine has the power to pardon Noling, but he can also reduce his sentence or stay the execution to provide more time to pursue a legal remedy.Noling, whose case has been the subject of documentaries and true-crime podcasts, has said he won’t accept a commutation of his sentence to life without parole.Typically, death row inmates aren’t allowed clemency hearings until they have an execution date.Noling doesn’t have one.
And during his appearance before the parole board, his lawyers from the Ohio Innocence Project argued that he had nothing to do with the murders of an elderly couple.Prosecutors, however, have insisted that Noling is an unrepentant killer who at age 18 was part of a gang that did a string of robberies in Portage County when he gunned down Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, on April 5, 1990, inside their home in Atwater Township.Bearnhardt Hartig had been shot three times and his wife had been shot five times with a .25-caliber automatic handgun.
Their house had been ransacked.Noling was convicted on the ...