Appeals court upholds rejection of death row inmate’s request for new trial

ELYRIA — An appeals court has rejected convicted killer Stanley Jalowiec’s latest attempt to win a new trial to overturn his death sentence.

The 9th District Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Visiting Judge Virgil Lee Sinclair was right when he rejected the request from attorneys representing Jalowiec because they failed to prove newly discovered evidence would clear their client’s name.

Stanley Jalowiec

Jalowiec was sentenced to die after being convicted in the 1994 slaying of police informant Ronald Lally, who was shot, stabbed, beaten and run over by a car in a Cleveland cemetery.

Jalowiec has claimed to have been at his mother’s house at the time of the killing, but both Sinclair and the appeals court found that wasn’t what the evidence showed.

“The new evidence to which Mr. Jalowiec points consists of speculation and alleged contradictions that do not create a strong possibility of a different outcome at trial,” the decision said. “…Counsels’ zeal for their client is admirable. But the evidence in the record does not ‘destroy’ the testimony of the State’s key witnesses or ‘make clear that on retrial, no reasonable juror would conclude that Jalowiec had any role in Lally’s death.’”

Instead, the appeals court wrote, the evidence in the case was consistent with what prosecutors argued, that “Danny Smith conspired with Raymond Smith to murder Mr. Lally, but left the murder itself to Raymond and Mr. Jalowiec.’”

Raymond Smith also was given the death penalty in the case, but his sentence later was commuted to life in prison after county Common Pleas Judge Christopher Rothgery concluded Smith was mentally retarded and could not be executed. Daniel Smith was acquitted by a jury of involvement in the killing.

Lawyers for Jalowiec from the Chicago-based Exoneration Project had argued that the case against their client was tainted by prosecutorial and police misconduct and suggested that Daniel Smith, not Jalowiec, had gone to Cleveland to kill Lally.

Michael Smith, Daniel Smith’s brother, was also in the car but wasn’t charged in the case.

The appeals court wrote that much of the evidence that Jalowiec’s attorneys had presented as new already had been reviewed in previous appeals and couldn’t be considered now.

It also rejected the allegations that police and prosecutors had badly mishandled the case as Jalowiec’s legal team had claimed.

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