The Supreme Court of Ohio today upheld the involuntary manslaughter conviction of a Clermont County man who was prosecuted 16 years after the death of a woman, who ultimately died from injuries she suffered as an infant. The Supreme Court found Scott Wilson could not prove the State’s delay in indicting him harmed his ability to defend himself after he was charged.

The Court affirmed Wilson’s conviction for the death of the woman, identified as “Hannah” in court records. In 1985, a few weeks after Hannah’s birth, Wilson shook her, and she suffered severe brain trauma. She lived with the effects of the injury for the rest of her life. She died in 2006; however, the Clermont County Prosecutor’s Office indicted Wilson for her death in 2022.

Wilson’s role in Hannah's death came to the prosecutor’s office's attention when Wilson applied to seal his records for the misdemeanor assault conviction he received in 1985 for harming Hannah. Wilson sought to dismiss the additional charges imposed after her death as a young adult, arguing the delay violated his due process rights because vital witnesses and records were missing or unavailable.

Writing for the Court majority, Justice Joseph T. Deters explained that under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Wilson had to demonstrate the delay caused actual, not speculative, prejudice to his defense and that the delay was “an intentional device to gain a tactical advantage for the State.”
Because Wilson could not demonstrate how the missing records or witnesses harmed his case, the Court denied his appeal without ruling on whether prosecutors intentionally delayed the indictment to gain an advantage, he wrote.

Justice Deters also stated the Court's majority decision overrules a line of its cases beginning with the 1984 State v. Luck decision, which created a test for claims that a delayed indictment has violated a defendant’s right to due process under the U.S. Constitution. The Luck test required the defendant to show that the delayed indictment caused harm to the defense. If that showing was made, the prosecution needed to provide evidence of a justifiable reason for the delay. Justice Deters explained that the Court in Luck said it rooted its decision in the U.S. Constitution but failed to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s binding precedent about delayed indictment claims brought under the U.S. Constitution.

Justices R. Patrick DeWine, Daniel R. Hawkins, and Megan E. Shanahan joined the opinion.

Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy concurred in judgment only, stating that the case could be decided by using only U.S. Supreme Court case law.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Patrick F. Fischer agreed that Wilson was not harmed by the delay and that his constitutional rights were not violated. However, he disagreed with the majority overruling the state’s test for preindictment delay, noting the prosecutor did not argue in the lower courts for overruling the state test.

Justice Jennifer Brunner joined Justice Fischer’s opinion.

Death Attributed to Shaking Infant
When Hannah suffered brain trauma in 1985, prosecutors obtained an indictment against Wilson for felonious assault. A jury acquitted him of the felony but found him guilty of the lesser included offense of misdemeanor assault. The jury found Wilson recklessly caused serious physical harm to Hannah, and he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Hannah experienced significant medical problems throughout her life and spent her last month living in a nursing home. She died in December 2006. A deputy coroner from neighboring Hamilton County, Dr. Michael Kenny, performed an autopsy.

Kenny determined that Hannah died from encephalopathy because of the late effect of blunt impact to her head. At Kenny’s request, Dr. Greg Balko, a neuropathologist, examined Hannah’s brain and reached the same conclusion as to the cause of death. Kenny attached Balko’s report to the autopsy report.

The Clermont County Prosecutor’s Office was notified of Hannah’s death in the month she died. The office did not file new charges against Wilson at that time.

Charges Arise a Decade Later
In 2022, Wilson applied to the Clermont County courts to seal the records of his 1985 conviction for misdemeanor assault. While preparing a response to the motion, an assistant county prosecutor reviewed Wilson’s criminal case file and discovered the autopsy report from 2006. The office and the Clermont County Sheriff’s Office began investigating Hannah’s death.

Investigators located Hannah’s medical records from 1985 through 2005, and found several witnesses, including the nurse who admitted infant Hannah to the hospital and an officer who investigated the 1985 incident, along with Hannah’s mother. Other witnesses were dead or unable to be located.

In 2022, a grand jury indicted Wilson on one count of involuntary manslaughter and one count of reckless homicide. Wilson sought to dismiss the charges based on preindictment delay.

Wilson argued his rights to due process were violated, and he would not receive a fair trial because vital witnesses and records were missing or unavailable. He cited the unavailability of the two doctors, Kenny and Balko, who produced the autopsy report.

He also claimed the 16-year delay was not justified. Prosecutors were aware of Hannah’s death in 2006 and of his connection to it. The prosectors had not collected any new evidence since the autopsy was completed, he noted. He argued the combination of actual prejudice and unjustified delay violated his constitutional rights.

As the trial court considered his motion, prosecutors located Kenny. They learned Balko died sometime between 2010 and 2012. Kenny testified that he could not remember why he asked Balko to examine Hannah’s brain, but he believed it could provide “supportive evidence.” He stated that Balko’s report did not change his opinion on Hannah’s cause of death, and that Balko’s examination was not critical to his ultimate findings of the cause of death.

The trial court denied Wilson’s motion, finding he did not prove the delay had harmed his defense and he failed to identify the missing or unavailable evidence that would help his defense. Wilson then pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter. The other charge was dropped, and Wilson was sentenced to two years in prison.

Wilson appealed, and the Twelfth District Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction. Wilson appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to consider his case.

Supreme Court Analyzed Undue Delay
Relying on the Luck decision and other Ohio cases that followed, Wilson maintained that he established that his defense was harmed by the delay and that the prosecution failed to justify the reason for delay.

Justice Deters wrote the Ohio test employs “a standard for showing prejudice that is too lenient and wrongly requires the State to demonstrate a justifiable reason for delay.” He noted the U.S. Supreme Court has placed on the defendant the burden of “proving concrete, actual prejudice” and of showing that the state acted in bad faith by delaying the indictment; the Court has not required the state to prove that it had a justifiable reason for delaying the indictment.

The opinion stated that Wilson, relying on the Ohio case precedent, presented speculative claims of potential harm from the missing evidence and witnesses. However, Wilson had to show the missing evidence “would have been favorable and material” to his defense under the U.S. Supreme Court’s standards, the majority opinion stated. Because he did not, the Court affirmed his conviction.

Assertion of Harm Speculative, Concurrence Maintained
In her opinion concurring in judgment only, Chief Justice Kennedy wrote that as the majority explained, all of Wilson’s prejudice arguments were speculative, and the unavailable evidence he identified was either not favorable or material to his defense or was similar to evidence that was available to him. His due process rights were not violated, she concluded.

Opinion Unnecessarily Overrules Ohio Precedent, Concurrence AssertedIn his concurrence, Justice Fischer disagreed with the majority’s decision to overrule 40 years of Ohio precedent on preindictment delay and to adopt a test that only a portion of the federal courts have adopted. He wrote that the majority’s opinion “wrongfully ignores” that the Court’s precedent on preindictment delay also comes from Ohio’s constitution, and not just the federal constitution.  Justice Fischer also wrote that the prosecutors never argued for the application of the federal test in the trial court, and the federal test did not alter the outcome of Wilson’s appeal.  Because it was unnecessary for the Court to use the federal test to reject Wilson’s appeal, the Court should not have considered overturning the Ohio precedent, the concurrence stated.

2025-0322. State v. Wilson, Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-3988.

View oral argument video of this case.

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