COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday delayed the execution of a convicted killer whose case federal public defenders said slipped through the cracks of the legal system.
Death row inmate David Martin, 36, had been scheduled to die May 26. The Associated Press reported last year that he went without a lawyer for more than a year after the court upheld his sentence in 2018 and missed a chance to make a customary appeal to the federal courts.
Justices have now stayed Martin's execution until all his legal options are exhausted. Martin was sentenced to die in 2014 for fatally shooting 21-year-old Jeremy Cole during a robbery in northeastern Ohio two years earlier.