POMEROY — Attorneys representing Paula Rizer in her 2010 murder trial have admitted an oversight in their defense of the convicted murderer, and Rizer’s attorney has asked that she be given a new trial.
Melissa Prendergast, assistant public defender, filed a petition to vacate her sentence imposed by Judge Fred W. Crow III, after a jury convicted her of murder. Rizer is serving a life sentence in the Marysville Correctional Institution for killing her husband. Rizer’s first trial, for aggravated murder, ended in an acquittal. She was found guilty of murder in January, 2010. She shot her husband, Kenneth Rizer, multiple times at their Lebanon Township home in 2009, and claimed at trial she had been a victim of domestic violence and was acting in self defense.
According to the petition Prendergast filed in Common Pleas Court, Rizer alleges she was denied effective counsel. Her attorneys, the petition says, failed to object to the violation of Rizer’s Fifth Amendment rights by a state expert witness who called Rizer’s self-defense claim a “double defense.” The petition also says Rizer’s court-appointed attorneys failed to object to Crow’s “faulty” self-defense jury instruction.“Testimony from Dr. Robert Stinson at trial and the state’s heavy reliance on that testimony in closing argument violated Rizer’s rights,” Prendergast said.
Stinson’s testimony pointed to inconsistencies between Rizer’s account to police of the moments leading to her husband’s death and what she later told him in a two-hour October, 2009 interview. In two interviews, one with Sheriff’s Deputy Scott Trussell and the second with Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation Agent Larry Willis, Rizer said she and her husband had a happy relationship, Stinson told Rizer’s second jury. Stinson, a state rebuttal witness, said Rizer told him her husband had once pushed her off a farm tractor during an argument, and raised his hand to her during another. Those incidents, Rizer told Stinson in the Washington County Jail, were “not typical” of their relationship. Rizer increasingly relied in her second trial on charges her husband intimidated and struck her, and pressured her into uncomfortable sexual situations. However, Stinson noted that she frequently stood up for herself, had her own interests and hobbies, and an internet business, all activities her husband endorsed, she told him. Such situations are not typical in cases of battered women, Stinson said at trial, and Rizer’s allegations against her husband served as a double defense — if one story would not help her case, perhaps another would. According to Prendergast, in pointing out discrepancies regarding the defendant’s recitation of facts, and questioning the truth of her representations regarding her own level of fear, Stinson’s testimony exceeds proper forensic bounds, and the evaluator’s role becomes “essentially like that of an agent of the state recounting unwarned statements made in a post-arrest custodial setting.”
“Dr. Stinson performed no testing but opined that Rizer did not suffer from battered-women syndrome,” Prendergast wrote, “and admitted he did not use tesing ‘because my evaluation was to get an abuse history and her version of what happened.’” Rizer’s attorneys, Herman Carson and Glenn Jones, filed identical affidavits with Rizer’s petition, stating, “my failure to object to the court’s faulty-self defense instructions was not part of a strategic trial, or theory of the case, but rather was an oversight resulting from a lack of specific analysis or decision making.” “My failure to object to the violation of Mrs. Rizer’s rights was not a product of trial strategy but rather a failure to properly analyze and place limitations on the state’s right to have an expert evaulate Paula Rizer when battered women’s self-defense was being raised.”“Because it is impossible to know whether the jurors rejected Rizer’s self-defense claim for proper reasons or for improper reasons, counsel’s ineffectiveness renders the result unreliable,” Prendegast said.
Prendegast asks Crow in her petition to declare the verdict in the case void or voidable and grant her a new trial, or the conduct an evidentiary hearing. Rizer’s original appeal is still pending in the Fourth District court. The state has until Tuesday to file its brief, but Rizer’s counsel were granted extensions to file their original brief.
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