Ohio death row inmate, backed by ex-sheriff, asks for full pardon

An inmate sentenced to death in Ohio had a rare opportunity this week to ask for a full pardon before the state’s parole board, after spending three decades on death row for a double murder that he insists he did not commit. 

Tyrone Noling, 54, of Alliance, presented his case Tuesday to the Ohio Parole Board. Backed by the Ohio Innocence Project, an organization that works to prevent wrongful convictions and exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners, Noling assembled a growing body of evidence to share during the hearing.

That includes recanted witness testimony, changed stances by the sheriff and one of the jurors at his trial, and clues pointing to an already executed killer as the possible perpetrator.

His case has been the subject of documentaries and true-crime podcasts and garnered celebrity attention from Kim Kardashian and actors Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who all support his exoneration. The case also called into question the practice of convicting and sentencing inmates to death for crimes to which no physical evidence had linked them, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that doesn’t take a position on capital punishment but provides research on how it is carried out.

Noling was convicted in the 1990 murders of an elderly couple in their home, which he has always said he did not commit. In lieu of physical evidence, some witnesses gave statements against Noling during his trial, but later recanted their statements and said they were initially pressured by the prosecutor to give them, the Death Penalty Information Center says.

Following Tuesday’s hearing, the first for an Ohio death row inmate since 2020, the parole board will issue its recommendation to Gov. Mike DeWine, who has the final say. DeWine, a Republican, called in June for abolishment of the death penalty — saying his stance has changed because he no longer views capital punishment as a deterrent to violent crime.

Death row inmates don’t typically land clemency hearings until they have an execution date, which Noling does not, so winning Tuesday’s hearing was a victory. He seeks release from prison and has said he would not accept a commutation to life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit.

Noling was convicted in the April 5, 1990, killings of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, at their Portage County home. The couple’s bodies were discovered on the kitchen floor of their Atwater Township home by a neighbor who noticed their lawn mower had been in front of their home for several days. Bearnhardt Hartig had been shot three times and his wife five times with a .25-caliber automatic handgun. The house had been ransacked.

Authorities said Noling, who had just turned 18 at the time, was part of a group involved in home robberies of elderly couples. Three others in the group — 14, 15 and 16 at the time — implicated Noling in the slayings of the Hartigs during a burglary but later retracted their statements, saying that police pressured them to name Noling as the shooter.

Initial aggravated burglary charges brought against Noling were dropped in 1992, but a grand jury reindicted him in 1995 for the Hartig murders. He was sentenced to death in 1996.

No physical evidence tied him to the crime, and no murder weapon was ever found. Noling’s advocates say evidence, including law enforcement notes and a cigarette butt found in the Hartigs’ driveway, points to two other potential suspects. One is Dan Wilson, who was executed by lethal injection in Ohio in 2009 for a different crime. Noling’s lawyers wrote in court documents that a man told authorities that his foster brother, Wilson, bragged about committing the crime.

Former Portage County Sheriff Ken Howe, now 83, will be among a long line of witnesses testifying on Noling’s behalf at Tuesday’s hearing. In an Associated Press interview, he said that there were red flags at the time, and evidence that’s piled up since then has persuaded him to take Noling’s side.

“I believe that these boys were, and are, innocent,” he said.

Portage County Prosecutor Connie Lewandowski and Caitlin Flanagan, an attorney for a team representing Noling, did not immediately return separate phone messages seeking comment.

Following the hearing, the board will deliberate in executive session and is expected to deliver a recommendation to the governor by Aug. 25.