Priest to appeal judge's denial for new trial

Gerald Robinson THE BLADE Enlarge | Photo Reprints

Toledo priest Gerald Robinson is appealing a Jan. 9 Lucas County Common Pleas Court ruling denying his request for a new trial in his 2006 murder conviction.

A notice of appeal was filed Monday with the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals. Robinson, who in 2006 was found guilty of murdering a Catholic nun in 1980, contended in an amended petition for post-conviction relief that his constitutional rights were violated because 136 police documents from 1980 had been misfiled and were not discovered until late 2009. Those documents could have altered his defense attorneys’ strategies during the trial, Robinson said.

Common Pleas Judge Gene Zmuda rejected the amended petition, saying in his 11-page ruling that Robinson “appears to argue the improbability of his guilt, based on his status as a Roman Catholic priest, ignoring the evidence of his guilt and grasping at speculation made possible by the previously undisclosed documents.…”

Robinson, 73, was convicted by a jury in the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl on Holy Saturday, 1980. The 71-year-old nun had been strangled nearly to death, then stabbed 32 times in the chest, neck, and face. Robinson had been a chaplain at the Catholic hospital where the murder occurred.

The amended petition is a collateral argument filed by Robinson in case his direct appeals were unsuccessful. It was put on hold and then reactivated in January, 2009, after the Ohio Sixth District Court of Appeals upheld his conviction and the Ohio Supreme Court chose not to hear the case. The U.S. Supreme Court in October, 2009, also declined to hear the case.

The amended petition process could take another 15 years, attorneys said.

Robinson, who is barred from ministry, remains a priest in the Toledo Catholic Diocese. He is serving a 15-years-to-life sentence at Hocking Correctional Facility in Nelsonville, Ohio.