26 July 2019 :

Cuyahoga County Judge Robert McClelland sent Anthony Apanovitch back to death row after the Ohio Supreme Court last year reversed his 2015 decision granting Apanovitch a new trial based on new DNA tests. Judge sends Cleveland man back to death row in 1984 rape and murder of nurse, despite reservations. McClelland in a 5-page opinion expressed dismay that Apanovitch was sentenced to death based solely on circumstantial evidence presented during a trial that took place just 55 days after the crime and noted the record of the case against Apanovitch was “troubling.” “It is difficult to be at the end of the line,” McClelland wrote. He said legal precedent and prior court rulings “leave this court with no other option than to deny the motion for new trial on the basis that the Defendant is unable to show a strong possibility that a new trial would end in a different result.” Apanovitch has been on death row since he was convicted of the rape, burglary and murder of Mary Ann Flynn, 33. Flynn hired Apanovitch to paint her home in the summer of 1984, according to records. He raped, beat and strangled her, prosecutors said. Flynn had previously told friends he had propositioned her and she was afraid of him. Apanovitch repeatedly appealed his conviction and death sentence. As part of that process, prosecutors in 1991 discovered slides of DNA evidence collected from Flynn’s vagina and mouth that had been misplaced in the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office, court records said. The next year, the office sought to obtain a DNA sample from Apanovitch to test against the newly discovered slides. Apanovitch resisted the testing, arguing through his lawyers that the results would likely be inaccurate and that the chain of custody had been broken. A federal court in 2006 ordered Apanovitch to give his DNA sample to prosecutors and testing revealed that Apanovitch was not a match for the DNA from Flynn’s vagina. But a forensic report and an expert hired by prosecutors found that Apanovitch was likely the source of the DNA in her mouth, according to court records. In 2012, Apanovitch filed a motion for post-conviction relief over the results of the newly discovered test results. McClelland held a 2015 hearing and acquitted Apanovitch of the vaginal rape charge, overturned his convictions on the other charges and ordered a new trial. Prosecutors appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, where a divided set of justices overturned the ruling and found that Ohio law barred McClelland from ruling on the post-conviction relief motion. McClelland in his Tuesday order wrote he agreed with the dissenting opinion in the Ohio Supreme Court’s original ruling on direct appeal that the death penalty was inappropriate for Apanovitch, but he did not have the authority to alter that decision because he could not hold that Apanovitch would likely have prevailed at a new trial based on the DNA test results.