The shooter is known, and it's not him.
On a winter's evening 23 years ago, at the corner of East 66th Street and Zoeter Avenue in Cleveland, somebody pumped two .38-caliber bullets into the chest of 74-year-old Sanders Leach, killing the produce vendor instantly.
Leroy Head, then 18, confessed almost immediately. Within minutes, he told two friends that he shot the fruit and vegetable man during a robbery, saying the old man forced his hand by trying to pull a gun. Head told his mother he did it, too. She urged him to come clean.
So he told police he did it as well. And he signed a confession.
Cuyahoga County prosecutors, at the time among the most aggressive in Ohio in pursuing the state's newly reinstated option for capital punishment, sought the death penalty. And they got it - adding to what was becoming a bumper crop of death cases from the county during the 1980s.
But it was not Head who was condemned to die.
Just before trial, Head struck a deal with prosecutors and fingered his co-defendant, Arthur Tyler, instead.
And so, in a case that reveals how arbitrary a death sentence in Ohio can be, it's Tyler - not Head - who faces execution, possibly this year.
The case also illustrates what attorneys and judges alike assert: that the bar for winning a death sentence was much lower two decades ago - especially in Cuyahoga County. And that challenges the legitimacy of basing executions on that standard today.
Evidence leaves little doubt that Tyler should be in prison. But whether he belongs on death row is another matter. There was no indication that Leach's 1983 murder was pre-meditated. So, under Ohio law, only the "principal offender" - the triggerman - could be executed.
But police found no gun or fingerprints, and no eyewitnesses who could sort out who actually pulled the trigger.
Prosecutors argued that Head's accusation of Tyler was more credible than his earlier confessions. Head was allowed to plead to a lesser charge.
He could be paroled as early as next year, even though he has acknowledged several times since that he was the triggerman after all.
Jurors recommended death for Tyler.
But they never heard about the bullet and the cash that police found in Leach's clothing within hours of his death. Defense attorneys say this evidence could have helped Tyler, but it was never shared with them. And it was never aired in court.
Arthur Tyler sits on Ohio's Death Row waiting to see if justice will happen or if he will die by lethal injection.
Leroy Head Confessed. He was freed this June!!!!! Arthur Tyler still on Death Row waiting to die for a crime he did not commit! http://justiceforarthurtyler.blogspot.com/
