BY SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
LEBANON
- For the first time in decades, a Warren County jury handed up a death sentence Tuesday, recommending capital punishment for convicted murderer James Hanna.
Mr. Hanna, 49, could be sent to the electric chair or receive lethal injection if Judge Neal Bronson of Warren County Common Pleas Court accepts the recommendation at a sentencing hearing Nov. 20.
The same jury convicted Mr. Hanna on Friday of aggravated murder in the killing of his cellmate, Peter Copas, in August 1997. Mr. Copas died three weeks after Mr. Hanna plunged a wooden paintbrush handle 5 inches into Mr. Copas' head through his eye, and then beat him with a lock wrapped in a sock in their cell at the Lebanon Correctional Institution.
Despite testimony for the defense that said Mr. Hanna suffered from numerous disorders and a violent, negligent upbringing, the jury decided in three hours that his crimes were too serious for a life sentence.
"It went back and forth a lot, and it finally came down to upholding the law itself," said jury foreman Scott Varnado of Deerfield Township. "We were not going by what possibly we morally felt was right, but what we were instructed by the judge to do."
The instructions called for the death penalty if the jury found that the circumstances - such as Mr. Hanna's previous crimes and Mr. Copas' murder in a prison - outweighed extenuating circumstances, such as Mr. Hanna's childhood and personality disorder.
The biggest deciding factor in giving Mr. Hanna the death penalty was the fact that he was in prison already for an earlier aggravated murder, Mr. Varnado said.
At the time of the assault on Mr. Copas, Mr. Hanna was serving two life sentences for 1978 convictions for aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder.
Outside court, prosecutors said the earlier murder conviction stemmed from a robbery near Toledo in which Mr. Hanna fatally stabbed a store clerk 33 times. A witness walked in on the murder and was stabbed by Mr. Hanna 37 times but survived.
The case took its toll on the jury, Mr. Varnado said. He had trouble sleeping the past two nights and said other jurors told of the same problem.
"It was very hard on all of us. None of us wanted to be responsible for the death of a man," he said.
Though the jury considered Mr. Hanna's troubled childhood and reported personality disorders, those factors weren't enough to spare him from ultimate punishment for his actions, Mr. Varnado said. Sending him back to prison for life was not a guarantee that he wouldn't harm another inmate in the future, he added.
The case had a large number of doctors testify about the injury to Mr. Copas after the stabbing. The defense tried to prove that Mr. Copas could have died from negligent care because he was not given a CAT scan until several days after the stabbing. The scan found a piece of the paintbrush lodged in his brain.
The death penalty trial is the fifth brought in the past 12 years since Prosecutor Timothy Oliver has been with the office. But it is the first one to secure a death sentence.
Defense lawyers refused to comment. An appeal is automatic.
