Ernest Martin was executed by the State of Ohio for the murder of Robert Robinson
According to court documents Ernest Martin would enter a pharmacy and in the process of robbing it would shoot and kill the owner Robert Robinson
Ernest Martin would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ernest Martin would be executed on June 18 2003 by lethal injection
Ernest Martin Photos
Ernest Martin FAQ
When Was Ernest Martin Executed
Ernest Martin was executed on June 18 2003
Ernest Martin Case
Anna Robinson spotted the lined trench coat on display at the Higbee Co. department store downtown and knew she had to buy it for her husband of almost 40 years. Days later, Robinson saw her 70-year-old husband in the coat, but it wasn’t how she imagined. Robert Robinson lay dead on the floor of his Fairhill Road convenience store, shot in the chest by bullets that smashed through the store’s front door. Police used the coat to cover his bloody body. It was Jan. 21, 1983.
“I begged him to get bulletproof glass on that door,” Anna Robinson, now 85, said recently, her voice rising and still filled with fury more than 20 years after the shooting. “My husband was good to everybody,” she said. “He would give people food on credit. He was a good man. “A life for a life, that’s what I say. Period.”
Today the state is scheduled to take Ernest Martin’s life by lethal injection as punishment for Robert Robinson’s murder. Ernest Martin filed an appeal yesterday with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking to fire his lawyers and have the justices order Ohio to appoint him new ones. Yesterday, in a cell just steps away from the execution chamber, Martin requested a meal of a cheeseburger, fries and a Pepsi, prison spokeswoman Andrea Dean said. She described Martin as upbeat and still hopeful of a legal victory.
He was a 22-year-old roofer when police arrested him within days of the shooting. A jury convicted him of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and carrying a concealed weapon that June and he was sentenced to die. More than 200 men have been sentenced to death since then. Martin will be the eighth man executed and the first of three Ohio executions scheduled in a 10-day span. Martin is now 42 years old and has spent the past 20 years on death row. Two of his children, now 22 and 24, were preschoolers the last time they saw him.
Ernest Martin has always maintained his innocence.
Investigators never found a gun nor any other physical evidence connecting Martin to the crime, the public defender’s office said. But testimony from his girlfriend, Josephine Pedro, helped seal his fate. Martin and Pedro lived together on Frank Avenue, about a block from Robinson’s Fairhill Cut-rate Foods. The store, now the site of an abandoned gas station, was at Cedar Avenue and Fairhill Road, which has since been renamed Stokes Boulevard. A woman who had lived with Martin and Pedro told investigators she heard them plan to rob Robinson. Pedro later told detectives she and Martin had planned the robbery, although not the shooting.
Pedro went to the store about 1 a.m. on Jan. 21 and persuaded Robinson to open the door, saying she had a cold and wanted to buy Nyquil. Robinson’s policy was to lock the door at 6 p.m. and open it only for customers he knew. He let Pedro in, but then locked the door again. When Martin showed up, he was surprised to find the door locked, prosecutors said, and shot through the door twice, hitting Robinson in the chest. Prosecutors contended that Martin then ran home, changed clothes and came back to the store, feigning concern over what had happened. Before police arrived, he also stole about $99 from the cash register, prosecutors said.
Martin declined to be interviewed for this story.
His family members said they believe Martin’s trial was unfair. They believe that Pedro, who was never charged with a crime, was coerced into testifying. And after a hearing with no jurors present, the trial judge barred testimony from the lone eyewitness, a man who lived near the store and looked out of his apartment window after hearing gunshots. That witness, now in jail himself, told Martin’s defense team he saw another man running from the store after the shooting. “There are two different justices out there,” Martin’s brother Erwin, 41, said recently. “There really are. We didn’t have any money so we didn’t have any defense. Justice is not blind, she’s peeking.” After a five-day trial, jurors deliberated for three more days before announcing their verdict. Martin was sentenced to death a month later – not long after Ohio reinstated capital punishment.
The Robinsons had lived together in an apartment behind their store. That fall, Anna Robinson closed the store, unable to run it herself. With just $3,000 in the bank, she moved into subsidized housing nearby. She continues to live there today.
Also that year, Ernest Martin and his family started on a quest to keep him alive. Martin, who dropped out of John Hay High School in the 11th grade, improved his reading and devoured law books to assist his defense. He wrote a 235-page autobiography. His 67-year-old mother, Frances Martin, said she cashed out her life insurance policy to buy him books and a typewriter so he could try “to do for himself what his lawyers didn’t.” She keeps a trial transcript and other documents in a duffel bag at her house. Martin’s sister Debra Reese has meticulously looked up the legalese in those documents and written the definitions of words she doesn’t understand in the margins. “I don’t really sleep no more,” Frances Martin said recently. “He’s on my mind all the time. I go to bed with him on my mind and I wake up with him on my mind.”
Three months ago, the Martin family got his scheduled March 24 execution postponed so his lawyers could argue that he is mentally retarded and unfit for execution. Martin was in learning-disabled classes in school, sucked his thumb throughout elementary school and wet the bed until he was a teenager, his lawyers said in a clemency application. But a psychologist the defense hired for Martin found he wasn’t retarded, and one of his lawyers dropped the claim on June 6.
On Friday, Gov. Bob Taft refused a last-ditch plea for clemency. Taft wrote: “There is no doubt that Mr. Martin is guilty of the murder of Robert Robinson, although he has persistently refused to take responsibility for his actions.” Martin’s public defender, Tim Payne, said that Martin’s case is an example of how capital punishment is “freakishly and arbitrarily applied.” “I don’t think that this case is appropriate for capital punishment,” Payne said. The killing, if Martin did it, “wasn’t planned and it was at night through a glass door.”
Since learning of Taft’s decision, Martin’s family has been preparing to make the trip to Lucasville to witness the execution. “I can’t fathom going to see my brother die,” said Martin’s sister Debra, “but somebody has got to be there for him.” Martin wrote to her recently and said, “If death is the only way I can be free then I’m not scared.” Robinson’s widow won’t make the trip to Lucasville because of ill health.
On a recent chilly day, she looked around her tiny, drafty apartment – with towels stuffed under the doors and window to keep out the cold – and pondered the past 20 years. “I don’t think he should live,” she said quietly. “He shot [Robert] for no reason at all. If that hadn’t happened, my husband would have been living yet and I never would have had to move here.”
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