NAACP Pens Letter to DeWine Pleading Clemency for China Arnold
Branch president Derrick Foward says Arnold, serving life without parole in the 2005 death of her infant daughter, should get the chance to go home to her three surviving children.
The Dayton Branch NAACP is asking Gov. Mike DeWine to commute the life sentence of China Arnold, the Dayton mother convicted of aggravated murder in the death of her 4-week-old daughter, Paris Talley.
In a six-page letter dated Oct. 26, branch President Dr. Derrick L. Foward asks the governor to grant Arnold executive clemency and release her. As an alternative, he asks DeWine to shorten her sentence to a term that would make her eligible for release under supervision, and to make sure her case gets a full review of her rehabilitation, conduct and family circumstances.
Foward writes that he recently visited Arnold at Dayton Correctional Institution and that the meeting affected him deeply. "I walked into DCI understanding the seriousness of this case," he wrote. "I walked out understanding something else."
The letter leans on a point Foward says is often lost in public discussion of the case: Arnold is Paris's mother and part of the grieving Talley family. She also has three other children, who Foward says have grown up without their mother present for birthdays, graduations and ordinary days. He writes that Arnold maintains her innocence, and argues that if she had pleaded guilty, she could have been eligible for release years ago.
Foward also points to what he calls sentencing disparities in Ohio cases involving the deaths of infants. He cites Brooke Skylar Richardson of Warren County, who was acquitted of homicide charges in her newborn's death and convicted only of gross abuse of a corpse, and the case of Emile Weaver, whose life sentence the Ohio Supreme Court sent back for a new sentencing hearing. Foward acknowledges in the letter that Richardson was acquitted and says he isn't suggesting she be treated as a murderer.
He closes by appealing to DeWine's record on the death penalty, noting the governor has repeatedly delayed executions since taking office in 2019. "I am not asking you to overturn the jury's verdict," Foward wrote, adding that he is asking DeWine to use the separate authority clemency gives a governor.
The letter was copied to the branch's executive committee, Ohio Conference NAACP President Tom Roberts and attorney Jon Paul Rion, who represented Arnold at trial.
The case
Paris Talley died Aug. 30, 2005. Arnold and her children were living with her boyfriend, Terrell Talley, in a Dayton housing complex. Prosecutors argued that Arnold deliberately placed the infant in a microwave oven and turned it on following an argument with Talley, which centered on whether he was the baby's father. A retired Virginia chief medical examiner testified that the baby died from being overheated.
Arnold has consistently denied killing her daughter. At one appeal hearing, Rion argued that the evidence pointed as much to Terrell Talley as it did to Arnold. Talley was never charged in his daughter's death.
The case went to trial three times, with a possible death sentence on the table each time.
Shortly after the first trial opened in February 2008, Talley said his son told him he had pulled Paris from the microwave after a neighbor's boyfriend put her inside, and the judge declared a mistrial. Arnold was convicted at her second trial in September 2008, but the jury did not agree on a death sentence.
On Nov. 5, 2010, Ohio's Second District Court of Appeals reversed that conviction, finding prosecutorial misconduct and ruling the trial court was wrong to block material witnesses from testifying for the defense. The appeals court later rejected the state's attempt to block a third trial, saying prosecutors had wrongly withheld witness information from Arnold's lawyers.
A jury convicted Arnold of aggravated murder again on May 13, 2011. Jurors did not vote for death, and she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The Second District affirmed that conviction in December 2013, and in May 2014 the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal.
Executive clemency is the remaining path. In Ohio, the governor holds the power to commute a sentence, with clemency applications typically reviewed by the Ohio Parole Board before a recommendation goes to the governor's office.
Foward's full letter appears below.
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