OHIO
Toledo Blade
BY JENNIFER FEEHAN
BLADE STAFF WRITER
A dying Catholic priest who was convicted of killing a nun has turned to a federal court judge to ask that he be allowed to return to Toledo, possibly to spend his final days in the care of nuns who have agreed to take him in.
Gerald Robinson, 76, is in a hospice unit at Franklin Medical Center in Columbus, a hospital run by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. His attorney, Rick Kerger, filed a petition for equitable relief Friday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland.
“In this instance what is sought is an act of grace for a dying man, relief the state cannot fashion,” Mr. Kerger wrote in the petition. “Yet the fact that the state has not provided for such relief does not mean that the federal court is impotent.”
Ohio law governing the release of dying prisoners states, “No inmate is eligible for release under this section if the inmate is serving … a sentence for aggravated murder or murder,” and an earlier appeal to Gov. John Kasich failed.
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