Terry Ferrell has spent more than 20 years in an Ohio prison for two Cleveland murders. The star witness against him has since recanted, and nearly 1,000 pages of police reports were never shown to his lawyers. A judge still refused him a new trial.
Ferrell was convicted in 2003 of killing his neighbors Mary Mosberger and Loretta Fallat in 1992. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and DNA on the murder weapons did not belong to him or to the women, according to a Marshall Project investigation published Monday. His case goes before an appeals court Tuesday.
His is not an isolated case. It is what Ohio’s rules produce. For years the state ran what is called closed discovery: prosecutors did not have to hand over their files, only read them aloud to defense lawyers in private, with no record kept. The Marshall Project found more than 1,000 people from Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, who were convicted in that era and are still in Ohio prisons.
Now they are trying to get back into court, and Ohio makes it hard. Unlike many states, it does not treat credible evidence of innocence as grounds for a new trial. Only people on death row are guaranteed a lawyer to pursue one. Judge John J. Russo denied Ferrell’s motion in January 2026 after hearings spread over six months, in which jailhouse informant Stephen Lenchak testified that he had lied.
The cost is not only human. Since 2013, at least 10 Cuyahoga County exonerees have received more than $50 million in wrongful imprisonment settlements. Seven of them were first turned down when they asked for a new trial. Each year of delay adds to the bill the public pays.
The Black stake is in the national numbers. Black Americans were 60% of the 147 people exonerated in the United States in 2024, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, and lost an average of 13.5 years each. A state that makes it harder to get a hearing makes it hardest on the people who are wrongly convicted most often.
Republican state Rep. Josh Williams of the Toledo area has reintroduced a bipartisan bill, House Bill 177, that would require judges to act on new trial requests backed by credible evidence. It has not advanced out of committee. A 2022 Ohio Supreme Court task force recommended changes to these procedural barriers, and four years later neither the legislature nor the court has acted.
“We’ve seen individuals waiting in prison without judges making decisions,” Williams said.
Nobody is asking Ohio to free anyone without proof. They are asking for a judge to look at it. Lawmakers can pass House Bill 177 in the lame-duck session, and until they do, every year of delay is a year someone may be serving for a crime they did not commit.
Have your say