By Kimberly Gasuras

Convicted triple murderer Kevin Keith has filed a lawsuit against the City of Bucyrus, accusing them of violating his civil rights.

City law director Rob Ratliff said that U.S. Marshals delivered the paperwork in January for the lawsuit that was filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio’s Eastern Division on Jan. 8.

“This will cost the city a lot of money to fight,” Ratliff said.

Keith was convicted after a two-week trial in 1994 of shooting to death Marichell Chatman, her seven-year-old daughter, Marchae Chatman, and Linda Chatman, as well as shooting and wounding an adult, Richard Warren, and two young children, brother and sister Quanita Reeves and Quinton Reeves, at a Bucyrus Estates Apartment.

Then-prosecutor Russell Wiseman attributed the motive for the murders as revenge for a relative of the Chatman’s being a drug informant.

Keith was sentenced to death for those murders and was less than two weeks away from his execution when then-Gov. Ted Strickland commuted Keith’s sentence to life without parole.

One of Keith’s attorneys, James R. Wooley, said the lawsuit was filed because Keith is an innocent man.

“He’s been sitting in a cell since 1994 for crimes he did not commit, and make no mistake about it: he is there because the authorities withheld critical evidence that completely undermines any notion that he committed these crimes,” Wooley said. “I’m sure they’ll say, ‘he’s had his day in court’ but when that ‘day in court’ involved concealment of critical evidence of innocence – including evidence that points squarely at another suspect – that kind of response rings hollow.”

The latest attempt last year by Keith and his attorneys to seek a new trial following his 1994 conviction for a triple murder in Bucyrus has met the same fate as his other appeals and was denied.

The lawsuit states that Keith was deprived of evidence that he could have used to demonstrate his entitlement to a new trial. The suit cited that key forensic evidence against Keith was provided by forensic scientist G. Michele Yezzo, but Keith was not informed that Yezzo was known to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) as an analyst who would “stretch the truth to satisfy” law enforcement.

Despite knowing that Yezzo was violating the constitutional rights of criminal defendants and Yezzo was permitted to render critical conclusions in Keith’s case. The prosecution did not inform Keith about Yezzo, her biases, and what it knew to be her work practices at any point during the time Keith could timely raise the issue in his allotted appeals.

The lawsuit also alleges that Bucyrus Police Officer at that time, Mike Corwin, and the city of Bucyrus concealed from Keith the evidence demonstrating that the Bucyrus Police Department ignored a defense subpoena issued at the time of Keith’s trial. Keith’s 2010 new trial motion was dismissed in part because Keith did not establish “bad faith” on the part of the police to meet the requirements under Arizona v. Youngblood. In response to a 2017 public records request, the suit states that the Bucyrus Police Department, Corwin, and City of Bucyrus finally disclosed to Keith evidence that demonstrated the department’s bad faith.

Keith and his attorneys are alleging that the defendants’ actions have resulted in Keith’s inability to have the evidence heard on the merits and that the lawsuit brings this civil rights action to obtain some effective vindication of Keith’s right to access to the courts to have the forensic evidence reevaluated fairly and to discourage these and similar defendants from such blatant constitutional violations in the future.

Along with the City of Bucyrus, defendants in the case include Yezzo, Corwin, Daniel Cappy, John Lenhart, the Bucyrus Police Department, the Crawford County Prosecutor’s Office, Crawford County Prosecutor Matthew Crall, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.

To view the complaint and jury demand for all the details of the lawsuit, visit www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/KevinKeith.pdf.