CLEVELAND (AP) — The man who famously put down his Big Mac to help rescue three women held captive for a decade in an Ohio house will never have to pay for another burger in his hometown.CINCINNATI – The national Innocence Project is backing a murder suspect’s efforts to exclude from his trial a videotape of a dying man’s eye blinks, which prosecutors say identify him as the gunman.
Ricardo Woods is scheduled to go on trial Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court in the fatal shooting of David Chandler. Chandler, 35, was shot in the head and neck as he was sitting in his car in Cincinnati on Oct. 28, 2010. He was paralyzed from his injuries and could only communicate with his eyes when police interviewed him a few days after the shooting.
Chandler was hooked up to a ventilator in the hospital when police questioned him about the person who shot him.
They showed him Woods’ photo and instructed him to blink three times for yes and twice for no as they videotaped his responses. Chandler didn’t respond with blinks to every question in the 17-minute video and sometimes blinked one time, but triple blinks came in response to repeated questions asking whether he knew the shooter and whether the person in the photo was the culprit.
Chandler died 10 days after the interview.
Prosecutors say Chandler clearly identified Woods as the shooter, and Judge Beth Myers found that the blinks were reliable and were made by pronounced eye movements and not by involuntary blinking. She ruled in 2011 that jurors will be allowed to see the videotape.
