CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court this week chose not to review the case of a man whose 2011 conviction was overturned after he spent eight years in prison for a shooting that his brother confessed to committing.
The decision means that Octavius Williams will get a chance to clear his name of attempted murder and other charges in a 2010 shooting that he has long maintained he didn’t commit.
Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy noted in a Tuesday announcement that the court declined the request by the Cuyahoga County prosecutors for the high court to review the case and ultimately reinstate Williams’ convictions.
Williams’ case played a role in the disbandment of prosecutor’s conviction integrity unit, whose external board members resigned during a dispute with Prosecutor Michael O’Malley. He had rejected the unit’s recommendation to drop the charges against Williams.
Williams was 17 when Dennis Cole was shot in the head during a chaotic gunfight at a Halloween party in 2010.
Cole, who was intoxicated during the party, identified Williams as the shooter. No other evidence tied Williams to the shooting.
Several of his family members told police after he was arrested that it was Williams’ brother, Ricky Williams, who pulled the trigger.
Prosecutors sought to have Octavius Williams tried as an adult, and a jury eventually convicted him of attempted murder and other charges. Common Pleas Judge Deena Calabrese sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Brother confesses
In 2012, Ricky Williams was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 22 years in prison in an unrelated case.
Ricky Williams provided a written confession to an investigator with the state public defender’s office in 2015. Two years later, he admitted to the shooting in an interview with the prosecutor’s office. In both cases, Ricky Williams said the shooting was in self-defense and that Cole attacked him.
When he was called to testify in the hearing on his brother’s motion for a new trial in January 2022, Ricky Williams invoked his right to remain silent and not incriminate himself.
Prosecutors also offered to let Ricky Williams plead guilty to attempted murder during the hearing. He opted to speak to a lawyer, and he countered several months later with an offer for him to plead guilty to felonious assault.
Prosecutors rejected the offer and said they had rescinded the plea offer a week earlier, according to court filings.
The new trial hearing also saw Larry Johnson testify. He was another man shot in the melee and is related to Cole. He testified that he knew Ricky Williams had shot Cole and that he tried to convince Cole before a hearing in juvenile court to “do the right thing” and not send the wrong person to jail.
Calabrese dismissed the testimony and found Ricky Williams’ confessions not to be credible in denying the motion for a new trial.
A unanimous panel of 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals judges reversed Calabrese’s ruling after finding that a jury would likely be swayed to acquit Octavius Williams had it heard his brother’s confessions.
Disbanding of the wrongful conviction unit
Williams’ case was instrumental in the ultimate demise of the prosecutor’s integrity unit.
The unit voted in 2019 to grant Williams’ application for the office to move to vacate his conviction and dismiss the charges.
O’Malley, who had the final say, disagreed with the unit’s decision. O’Malley offered not to oppose a motion for Williams to be released early from prison in 2019. At that point, he had spent eight years behind bars.
After his release, Williams’ attorneys, Rachel Troutman and Joanna Sanchez from the Ohio public defender’s office, filed motions to overturn his conviction and cited the unit’s vote.
The members of the unit’s board resigned in October. In a letter notifying O’Malley of their resignations, they wrote that O’Malley had told them he wanted to keep information the unit discovered during its investigation of cases from being obtained and used by defense attorneys to support motions for new trials.
The board’s members also noted that O’Malley’s office had not asked them to review a case since 2019 -- the same year they voted to recommend O’Malley drop the charges against Octavius Williams.
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