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With the trial date one month away, Thomas and Kaprise Sledge and their attorneys attended a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland in the March 2, 2024, murder of U.S. Postal Service carrier Jonte Davis, 33, on Warren's north side.
They "indicated that they will maintain their pleas of not guilty and go to trial as scheduled" Aug. 17, according to court documents.
Kaprise Sledge, 25, of Warren, and Thomas Sledge, 46, of Youngstown, are charged with murder of a federal employee and discharging a firearm during a violent crime in the 1:44 p.m. homicide. If convicted, both could receive life in prison, but not the death penalty.
In recent months, the focus of the case has been several motions filed by the attorneys for the Sledges. Judge Donald C. Nugent is presiding over the case.
In March, federal prosecutors filed responses to defense motions that asked for prosecutors to turn over information that might help or hurt their case, information regarding the defendants' history and background, and information regarding confidential informants or cooperating witnesses.
Another issue the defense has raised deals with cellphone locational information that law enforcement obtained through a search warrant. Such information can indicate the location of a person's cellphone at various points in time, a useful tool for suggesting whether a cellphone or various cellphones belonging to a suspect were in close proximity to a crime scene at the time the crime was committed.
But the courts have set limits on how such data can be used against a defendant, citing the Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment states that "no warrants shall be issues but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Though the most recent defense filing on the matter is not available to the public through the federal court website, federal prosecutors responded to the defense filing on Tuesday, and that document challenges aspects of the most recent defense filing.
The defense filing cites the June 29, 2026, U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Chatrie v. United States in which by a 6-3 vote the top court found that police officers "conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Okello Chatrie's location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cellphone location information."
The arguments by the defense and prosecutors in the Sledge case focus on whether the protections in the June ruling in Chatrie and other cases were adhered to in the Sledge case.
The prosecution filing states that the defense only submitted its filing about a week ago and states that the defense filing "misinterprets the Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie" and "misrepresents the scope of the warrants that the government obtained from Magistrate Judge (Carmen) Henderson," who works for U.S. District Court Judge Benita Y. Pearson in U.S. District Court in Youngstown.
"The government did not obtain general warrants to search a vast amount of personal information. In fact, the warrants here were narrow, particularized and proper. It obtained a small amount of data."
The filing, by U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio David Toepfer and Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Hammond, says the defense misstates the information Henderson authorized.
"The government did not obtain a 'vast quantity of data' or a 'wealth of personal information,'" and Henderson "did not authorize the government to obtain any individual's email address," as Sledge claims.
"Instead, the challenged warrants authorized the government to obtain the telephone number and serial number from the mobile devices that were near the crime site and the area where the suspect's vehicle was discovered," the government filing states.
The warrants also "authorized the government to obtain information about the 'sector' of the cellphone tower to which it was connected, and the date/time/duration/type of each communication. Nothing more. The warrant did not authorize the government to obtain any content of any communications."
The warrants did not authorize the government to obtain any sensitive personal identifying information. The location was narrow: within a 150-meter radius of the crime scene or suspect's car," the filing states.
It added that the "duration was also narrow: just a one-half hour timespan, which covered approximately 15 minutes before and after the homicide."
Court documents from Tuesday's hearing state that a hearing on all pending motions will be at 9 a.m. July 31 in Cleveland federal court.