High court orders inmate's immediate release

6/1/2018

COLUMBUS — The Ohio Supreme Court on Friday ordered the immediate release from prison of a former North Toledo man who’d completed his sentence for the 1993 beating death of his girlfriend.

The high court unanimously found that Tyrone Oliver, 56, should have been released on Jan. 9 upon expiration of his maximum 25-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction had planned to keep him behind bars until Jan. 9, 2020 for a subsequent felony conviction that carried two years.

The court found that the sentencing judge did not expressly order that the newer two-year sentence be tacked onto the end of the original sentence. So it was automatically considered to be served concurrently with the original sentence under Ohio’s 1996 truth-in-sentencing law.

Oliver was sentenced in 1993 in Lucas County Common Pleas Court to eight to 25 years for killing his girlfriend, Linda Adams, 38. She died several weeks after the severe beating.

He was paroled in 2003 after serving about 10 years. In 2005, he pleaded guilty in Fulton County to domestic violence. He was again paroled, found later to have violated the terms of that parole, and was sent back to prison, most recently the Grafton Correctional Institution.

“The fact that a defendant was on probation or parole for a prior offense is now simply one factor that a court may cite as grounds for imposing consecutive sentences, not a circumstance that requires consecutive sentences,” the Supreme Court said.