A woman who once asked for the death penalty as a means of proving racial injustice now wants her conviction overturned. On Tuesday, her attorney argued before the Ohio Supreme Court that she was unaware of the consequences of her actions.
Trumbull County native, Donna Roberts, 61, was convicted of aggravated murder in early 2003 for killing her ex-husband, Robert Fingerhut. Nathaniel Jackson, 33, of Youngstown, Ohio, was also convicted of the same charge. The two were accused of killing Fingerhut in late 2001.
In Roberts’ sentencing trial she signed a waiver of mitigation and told the court she wanted the death penalty because as a white, Jewish woman she expected the same punishment that her accomplice, Jackson, a black male, received.
Roberts is one of two women currently on Ohio’s death row. She is incarcerated in Marysville, Ohio, and sentenced to die by lethal injection. Nicole Diar, of Lorain, Ohio, is the other woman on death row.
During Jackson’s imprisonment for a previous crime, he had been in contact with Roberts and police intercepted phone calls between the two that detailed their plans to kill Fingerhut and collect his life insurance.
According to a summary of the case on the Supreme Court’s Web site, police found Fingerhut lying in a pool of blood on the couple’s kitchen floor. There was no forced entry into the home. Police found a total of 288 letters of correspondence between Roberts and Jackson.
Jackson’s death penalty sentence was upheld in his appeal before the Supreme Court earlier this month.
Roberts’ lawyer, David Doughten, argued before the court that Roberts was uninformed of the fact that waiving the mitigation would result in a death penalty conviction.
“(Roberts) had this martyr complex at the time,” Doughten said before the court.
Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer said if Roberts would have offered mitigation she most likely would not have received a death sentence.
“She’s not the typical death defendant,” he said. “They’re not the type of person to have accomplished what she’s accomplished.”
Roberts, along with her ex-husband, ran a number of Greyhound bus depots in Trumbull County. She also participated in a 1967 Israeli conflict where she bandaged wounds of soldiers.
LuWayne Annos, the attorney for the State of Ohio and the Trumbull County prosecutor’s office, said Roberts was given what she asked for.
“You ask for it, you got it,” Annos said, quoting an old Toyota advertising slogan.
Annos said Roberts was well informed of the consequences that would be imposed if she waived mitigation.
“(Roberts) made it clear to her judge, counsel and jury that she wanted the death penalty,” Annos said. “Her statement was an opportunity to take a soapbox. She wanted to look the jury in the eye and say there was an injustice here.”
Annos said she agreed with Moyer in that Roberts had much to offer in mitigation for her case.
“There were good things to say about Donna Roberts,” Annos said. “Donna Roberts chose not to say them. This isn’t a woman who made a scattering off-the-wall statement; she got what she requested.”
Another argument was that the trial judge only heard an opinion of whether or not to impose a death sentence from the prosecution during the sentencing trial.
According to Doughten, the trial judge gave his notes of the trial to the prosecutor and from those notes the prosecutor drafted a summary that he gave to the judge.
Moyer said because the Supreme Court writes laws on every case, the court should think about drafting a law requiring a trial judge to receive equal input from both the defense and prosecution when preparing an opinion on a death charge.
“It’s very easy for the trial judge to say, ‘Do my work for me,'” he said. “We wouldn’t want the trial judge to go easy.”
Despite pushing for a new sentencing hearing, Doughten said he expects the Supreme Court to send back the case to the trial judge for him to simply rewrite the opinion.
“I think this should be minimally what the court should do,” he said.
