WARREN — In one of his final decisions before retirement, Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge W. Wyatt McKay rejected the bid of death row inmate Andre Williams to avoid execution.

In a 51-page ruling filed late Thursday, McKay determined that attorneys for Williams had not proven the inmate has significant adaptive deficits to be ruled intellectually disabled and thus saved from the death chamber.

Williams, 55, was sentenced to death in 1989 for the home invasion that left George Melnick, 65, of Warren, dead; and for the beating, blinding and attempted rape of Melnick’s wife, Katherine. On Feb. 17, 1989, Williams broke into the elderly couple’s home located on Wick Street SE in Warren.

Williams lost a series of appeals, beginning in the 1990s, to get him off death row. In 2016, he was granted a disability hearing, known in the courts as an Atkins hearing. In the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is intellectually disabled.

After hearings peppered over several years, McKay in April 2019 upheld the death penalty decision against Williams.

In January 2021, however, the 11th District Court of Appeals reversed the decision and the case was returned to McKay’s court for further proceedings.

In November in McKay’s court, Williams’ defense attorney Allen Rothman called Stephen Greenspan as a “teaching witness” to give expert testimony on intellectual disability.

Greenspan is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. In his testimony, Greenspan said intellectual disability is characterized by three factors — “significant deficits” in intellectual functioning, typically determined by a gold-standard IQ test; adaptive behavior; and that the former manifest within a developmental period, typically defined as between birth and age 22.

In his ruling, however, McKay wrote: “… after weighing the testimony presented, the court finds that the anecdotal evidence was insufficient to establish that Williams exhibits significant limitations in one or more adaptive skills. Much of the testimony centered on what the declarants believed that he could or could not do or referred to the fact that they never saw Williams performing the task. None of these things definitively showed that Williams exhibited significant limitations in one or more adaptive skills.”

During the previous hearings before McKay, testimony centered around the fact Williams had scored 75 on an IQ test, putting him in the “borderline range of intelligence.”

Williams, who is being held at Chillicothe Correctional Institution, did not appear in court for the early November hearing.

On Dec. 11, however, Williams, nicknamed “Kokomo,” sent a handwritten letter to McKay, asking that a letter the inmate had written to his attorney Alan Rossman be included in the court’s record.

In the letter to his attorney, Williams stated his dissatification.

“Ever single time I ask y’all for some information about my case, (you) give me the run around … but everytime I ask y’ll to send me stuff, y’ll claim like y’all can find nothing … but keep playing me like this retarded (expletive) …”

Williams also accused his defense lawyers of being dishonest, especially about their strategy in his case.

“I want y’all off my case,” he wrote.

Williams said he wanted transcripts from the medical examiner who was going to testify about George Melick suffering injuries from a wooden ax handle in his head.

“Chris Daniels (co-defendant) had the wooden ax handle and the victim Mrs. Melnick suffered all her injuries from being beat by the wooden ax handle,” Williams wrote.

In an earlier handwritten letter to McKay, Williams on Dec. 1 asked that all proceedings in his Atkins hearing be stopped. That letter was also entered as part of the court record.

McKay, who has served 36 years on the bench, was barred from a re-election in 2022 by a state law that sets a judge’s retirement age. He will be succeeded on the Trumbull County Common Pleas bench by former State Sen. Sean O’Brien, who has already taken the oath of office.