Ohio death row inmate Tyrone Noling gets rare chance to ask parole board for pardon

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Tyrone Noling has spent 30 years on death row for the double murder of an elderly Ohio couple that he insists he didn’t commit. He had a rare chance Tuesday to make his case for a full pardon to the Ohio Parole Board.

Noling, 54, of Alliance, assembled a growing body of evidence — with the support of the Ohio Innocence Project — to present at his clemency hearing. That includes recanted witness testimony, changed stances by the sheriff and one of the jurors at his trial, and clues pointing to an already executed killer as the possible perpetrator.

His case has been the subject of documentaries and true-crime podcasts and garnered celebrity attention from Kim Kardashian and actors Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who all support his exoneration.

Following Tuesday’s hearing, the first for an Ohio death row inmate since 2020, the parole board will issue its recommendation to Gov. Mike DeWine, who has the final say. DeWine, a Republican, called in June for abolishment of the death penalty — saying his stance has changed because he no longer views capital punishment as a deterrent to violent crime.

Tyrone Noling. Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction / via AP file

Death row inmates don’t typically land clemency hearings until they have an execution date, which Noling does not, so winning Tuesday’s hearing was a victory. He seeks release from prison and has said he would not accept a commutation to life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit.

Noling was convicted in the April 5, 1990, killings of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, at their Portage County home. The couple’s bodies were discovered on the kitchen floor of their Atwater Township home by a neighbor who noticed their lawn mower had been in front of their home for several days. Bearnhardt Hartig had been shot three times and his wife five times with a .25-caliber automatic handgun. The house had been ransacked.

Authorities said Noling, who had just turned 18 at the time, was part of a group involved in home robberies of elderly couples. Three others in the group — 14, 15 and 16 at the time — implicated Noling in the slayings of the Hartigs during a burglary but later retracted their statements, saying that police pressured them to name Noling as the shooter.

Initial aggravated burglary charges brought against Noling were dropped in 1992, but a grand jury reindicted him in 1995 for the Hartig murders. He was sentenced to death in 1996.

Read the full article at NBC News.