I.
Trial Testimony and Jury Verdict
{¶
2} In 2005, Walton was charged with one count each of
aggravated murder and aggravated robbery for the murder of
Van Echols, each count carrying one- and three-year firearm
specifications. He was also charged with one count of having
weapons while under a disability. The trial court's
journal entry denying Walton's petition for
postconviction relief accurately set forth the evidence
adduced at trial and the jury's verdict as follows:
At the time of his death, Echols was living with Veronica
Malloy at 3239 East 49th Street in Cleveland. For about a
year before Echols's murder, Malloy also knew Alvin
Walton - who went by the nickname "Kato" -as a
person dealing drugs from an apartment across the street from
her house. On May 21, 2005, a little after midnight, Malloy
heard a car horn just outside her house. She looked out her
window and saw a pickup truck owned by an acquaintance, so
she went outside to see what was happening. When she got to
the truck she saw that Walton was driving the truck, not her
friend. Once she realized it was [Walton], she "turned
around and ran inside the house and locked the door because I
knew there were going to be problems."
Walton followed her and began pounding on her front door,
eventually kicking it in and entering the house. He told
Malloy he was looking for Echols, and all she could tell him
was that Echols was out at a bar, so Walton settled in to
wait. It was during this time that Walton handed his business
card to Malloy and her mother and told them ["I'm
not here to shoot him. I'm not here to hurt him. Would I
be passing out my business cards if I
was?"][1] Soon the home phone rang. Echols was on
the other end of the line and Walton took the phone from
Malloy and began to tell Echols that "everything was
cool" and he "just needed to clean things up."
During that same call, Walton received a call on his cell
phone, and Malloy heard Walton say that Echols was coming
down Dolloff, one street over from East 49th. Soon
thereafter, Echols arrived at the broken front door and
Walton went out the back door to chase him. Malloy did not
leave the house, but she heard three gun shots and
then she heard two vehicles pull away. At that point, she
went outside and saw Echols's jacket in the driveway of
the apartment across the street. Malloy began to look for
Echols; in the meantime, her mother called the police.
Although [Malloy] could not see the shooting through her
wall, Deborah Peterson had an unobstructed view of the
slaying. Peterson lived at 3244 East 49th, across the street
from Malloy. She testified that at 3:35 a.m., she "woke
up to just hard banging" and looked outside to see two
men on Malloy's porch. After banging on Malloy's door
with no answer, the men got into a truck and left. She soon
heard yelling in the street and looked out to see two men
come off Malloy's porch. One of them - Echols, as it
turned out, but Peterson only knew of him as Veronica
Malloy's boyfriend - kept saying "I wouldn't do
you that fucking way" while the other man repeated
"you fucked me over, mother fucker." Echols then
began to run and the other man ran after and shot him. Under
cross-examination by defense counsel, Peterson - who is five
feet and seven inches tall - acknowledged that the shooter
"was about my height."
Peterson immediately called 911. During her trial testimony,
she described the shooter as a black man with a bald head and
wearing all black, but she admitted she did not see his face.
She also testified that a gold Ford Taurus drove up, in
reverse, alongside the shooter right after the first shot;
then continued to drive next to him as he chased the victim
until both the shooter and the car were out of sight.
Her rendition of events during the 911 call was somewhat
different from her trial testimony. The entire 911 call was
played at least twice in the hearing of the jury while
Peterson testified. During the call, she said that the
shooter got out of the gold Taurus before the shooting, but
in her testimony, she stood by her assertion that the gold
car pulled up after the first shot and there were only ever
two men on the street, the killer and the killed. But
Peterson's observation of the gold sedan was important
because Echols's sister, Tina Echols, testified that the
last place her brother was before getting murdered was her
house, and that when he left her house, a gold four-door
owned by Charles Pinson "made a U-turn real fast in my
parking lot and zoomed behind my brother."
Pinson, as it happens, was Alvin Walton's best friend and
roommate, and had known Van and Tina Echols for a number of
years. Indeed, Pinson and Tina Echols dated for awhile, but
that relationship ended about a month before the murder when
Van Echols and others robbed
Pinson of money and drugs at Tina Echols's house. After
that robbery, Pinson told Tina Echols that he was going to
kill Van Echols.
One other fact about Charles Pinson was in evidence at trial:
he is "approximately five-six or five-seven with a bald
head."
When the police investigated the scene of the crime, they
found a quilted black jacket that Veronica Malloy identified
as the same jacket Walton was wearing when he broke into her
house. A forensic examination of the garment revealed that
Walton's DNA and gunshot primer residue were on it.
Additionally, cell phone records showed calls between
Pinson's phone and Walton's around the time of the
murder.
At the state of Ohio's request, and over the
defendant's objection, the court provided the jury with
an instruction on accomplice liability.[2]Nevertheless, the
thrust of the prosecutors' closing argument to the jury
was that Walton was the shooter.
Walton's counsel, however, argued that Pinson shot
Echols. The defense also tried to persuade the jury that the
shooter couldn't have been Walton by pointing out that
Deborah Peterson said the killer was five-foot-seven and
"nobody in their right mind is going to confuse Alvin
Walton as five-foot-seven."
The jury then returned verdicts of guilty on count one,
murder under R.C. 2903.02, the lesser included offense of
aggravated murder as charged, and count two burglary [the
lesser included offense of aggravated burglary, as charged].
The jury, however, found Walton not guilty of all firearm
specifications. Count three, having a weapon under a
disability, was tried to the court and the judge found Walton
guilty on that count. The defendant was then sentenced to a
prison term of life with first parole eligibility after 15
years on the murder, and concurrent sentences of eight and
five years on the other two counts. He remains in prison
today.
(10/20/22 Judgment Entry, p. 5-8.)
II.
Petition for Postconviction Relief and Motion for Leave to
File a Motion for New Trial
{¶
3} This court affirmed Walton's convictions on appeal.
State v. Walton, 8th Dist. Cuyahoga No. 88358,
2007-Ohio-5070. Walton's discretionary appeal of that
decision was denied by the Ohio Supreme Court, as was his
application for reopening. See State v. Walton, 117
Ohio St.3d 1408, 2008-Ohio-565, 881 N.E.2d 275, and State
v. Walton, 8th Dist. Cuyahoga No. 88358, 2009-Ohio-1234,
respectively. Following the appellate litigation, Walton
filed numerous pro se motions in the trial court. In
September 2019, he filed a motion for leave to file a motion
for new trial and, in October 2019, a petition for
postconviction relief.
{¶
4} Both motions claimed that Walton was entitled to a new
trial because the state had suppressed exculpatory evidence
in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83
S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963).[3] Specifically, Walton alleged
that despite the state's assertion in its discovery
response that "[n]o exculpatory material [was] available
to or in the possession of the Prosecuting Attorney,"
the state had not disclosed prior to trial the existence of
police reports regarding interviews with Larenzo Ealom and
Walter Doss, two eyewitnesses to the shooting. Walton alleged
that he had only recently obtained the police reports through
a public-records request.
{¶
5} Exhibit C to Walton's petition was a typed statement
dated June 1, 2005, prepared by Cleveland police detective
Michael Beaman, signed by Ealom. According to Ealom's
statement, as he and Doss were walking down an alley near
East 49th Street, they heard two gunshots. Ealom said he then
looked and saw "a guy named Van" being chased and
shot at by a male who had a gun in his hand. Ealom said the
gunman ran after Echols and then Ealom heard two more shots.
According to Ealom, he and Doss ran but the male with the gun
caught up with them at some point and pointed the gun at
them. Ealom said he and Doss ran to his house, where he
called the police. He then showed the police where the
victim's body was. Ealom described the shooter as "a
dark skin guy, dressed all in black * * * he might have been
bald headed, but I could not tell for sure because he had a
hood on." Ealom acknowledged...
