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Hill execution will mean justice served

It was 30 years ago today that 12-year-old Raymond Fife was tortured and savagely murdered.

The Warren boy had been riding his bike to a Boy Scout meeting in a wooded area near Palmyra Road SW when he was attacked by Danny Lee Hill, then 18, and Timothy Combs, then 17. Raymond was beaten, sexually tortured, strangled with his underwear, set afire and left for dead. The boy was barely alive when he was found several hours later by his father and brother-in-law, and he died two days later.

Combs and Hill were caught, tried and convicted. Because Combs was a juvenile at the time, he was not eligible for the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to serve multiple, consecutive life sentences. Hill was sentenced to die.

But 30 years later, he is still very alive on Ohio’s death row. Hill’s attorneys continue to file appeal after appeal in their fight to prove their client has diminished mental capacity, hoping to make him ineligible for the death penalty. Their latest attempt is to earn a new trial because the defense team now is arguing that information Hill provided to police during an interview was obtained inappropriately.

In 2002, the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office, after 15 days of trial, successfully disproved a claim by Hill that he was mentally disabled, said Prosecutor Dennis Watkins. In various tests conducted before and after Hill was convicted, his IQ has fluctuated below and above the determining threshold of 70, according to court records. Despite that, he amazingly has been able to defend himself pro se (without the help of an attorney) and has been accused of trying to fool the tests.

The latest appeal is pending in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.

In the years since the horrible crime, Raymond’s father, Isaac Fife, died with the regret of never seeing the execution of the man who viciously murdered his little boy.

And now, Raymond’s aging mother, Miriam Fife, is 75 and holding out hope that Hill will die before she does.

Granted, we believe that all defendants deserve their right to full appeals. They should have their day in court and there should never be any question of guilt. In this case, all those conditions have been met many times over.

Now enough is enough. As Miriam Fife said, it is “utterly ridiculous.”

The Fife family and the citizens of Trumbull County deserve to see an end to this, and to see justice carried out.

It’s time to stop the delays and unnecessary spending of inordinate amounts of public money on this now-30-year-old case.

As Miriam Fife said last week, it’s not about vengeance, it’s about justice.

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